by Riley Sager
No, not a dream.
A nightmare.
In this maybe-nightmare state, I hear voices just outside the door. A man and a woman.
“You need to rest,” the man says.
I note the accent. Dr. Wagner.
“What I need is to see her,” the woman says.
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Ask me if I give a damn. Now push me in there.”
That’s followed by a hum. Rubber wheels on the floor. Someone in motion.
Because of the fog, I can’t recoil when a hand, leathery and rough, clasps my own. My eyelids part just enough to see Greta Manville, looking frail and small in a wheelchair. Her skin clings to her bones. Veins zigzag beneath the papery whiteness. She reminds me of a ghost.
“I didn’t want it to be you,” she says. “I need you to know that.”
I close my eyes and say nothing. I don’t have the strength.
Greta senses this and fills the void with more chatter.
“It was supposed to be Ingrid. That’s what they told me. During her interview, they asked for her medical records and she handed them over. Lo and behold, she was a potential match. But then she left and there you were. Another match. I had no choice in the matter. It was you or certain death. So I chose life. You saved me, Jules. I will always be grateful for that.”
I open my eyes again, just so I can glare at her. I see that she’s wearing a hospital gown similar to mine. Light blue. The same color as the bedroom wallpaper in 12A. Near the collar, someone has pinned a golden brooch just like the one Marjorie Milton was wearing.
An ouroboros.
I pull my hand away from hers and scream until I fall back to sleep.
47
I wake.
I sleep.
I wake again.
Some of the fog has burned away. Now I can move my arms, wiggle my toes, feel the painful intrusion of the IV and catheter that invade my body. I can even tell that someone’s in the room with me. Their presence pokes through my solitude like a splinter through skin.
“Chloe?” I say, hoping against hope that all of this has been a nightmare. That when I open my eyes I’ll be back on Chloe’s couch, heartbroken about Andrew and worried about finding a new job.
I’d settle for that kind of worry.
I’d embrace it.
I say her name again. A wish repeated. If I keep saying it, maybe it will come true.
“Chloe?”
“No, Jules, it’s me.”
It’s a man, his voice at once familiar and unwanted.
I open my eyes, my vision blurred by whatever it was they gave me. In that watery haze, I see someone in the chair beside the bed. He comes into focus slowly.
Nick.
He wears a new pair of glasses. Basic black instead of tortoiseshell. Beneath the frames, a wicked bruise circles his right eye. The spot where my foot connected with his face. I’d do it again to his other eye if I could. But all I can do now is lie here, a prisoner to his gaze.
“How are you feeling?” he says.
I remain silent and stare at the ceiling.
Nick places a plastic tumbler full of water and a small paper cup on the tray beside the bed. Inside the paper cup are two chalky white pills the size of baby aspirin.
“I brought you something for the pain. We want you to be comfortable. There’s no need to suffer.”
I continue to stay quiet, even though I am in pain. It burns through my abdomen—a fierce, throbbing agony. I welcome it. That pain is the only thing distracting me from fear and anger and hate. If it goes away, I’ll descend into a dark swamp of emotion from which I might never escape.
Pain equals clarity.
Clarity equals survival.
Which is why I break my silence to ask the question I didn’t have the strength to utter yesterday.
“What did you do to me?”
“Dr. Wagner and I removed your left kidney and transplanted it into a needy recipient,” he says, avoiding using Greta’s name, as if I don’t already know it’s her. “It’s a common procedure. There were no complications. The recipient’s body is responding well to the organ, which is excellent. The older the patient, the more common it is for their body to reject a transplanted organ.”
I muster the strength to ask another question. “Why did you do it?”
Nick gives me a curious look, as if no one has ever asked him that before. I wonder how many people in this same predicament have squandered that opportunity.
“Under normal circumstances, we prefer that donors know as little as possible. It’s better that way. But since these aren’t normal circumstances, I see no harm in trying to clear up some of your misconceptions.”
He hisses the word with clear distaste. As if it’s my fault that he’s being forced to say it.
“In 1918, the Spanish flu came out of nowhere, killing more than fifty million people worldwide,” he says. “To put that in perspective, the Great War going on at the same time killed almost seventeen million. Right here in America, more than half a million people died. As a doctor, Thomas Bartholomew was on the front lines of this particular war. He saw it strike down friends, associates, even family members. The flu didn’t discriminate. It was ruthless. It didn’t care if you were rich or poor.”
I remember that horrible picture I saw. The dead servants lined up on the street. The blankets over their corpses. The dirty soles of their feet.
“What Thomas Bartholomew couldn’t understand was how a millionaire could succumb to the flu as easily as a piece of tenement trash. Shouldn’t the wealthy, by virtue of their superior breeding, be less susceptible than people who have nothing, come from nothing, are nothing? He decided his destiny was to build a facility where important people could live in comfort and splendor while he kept them safe from many of the ailments that afflicted the common class. That’s how the Bartholomew was born. This building was willed into existence by my great-grandfather.”
A memory forces its way into my pain- and drug-clouded mind. Nick and me in his dining room, talking over pizza and beer.
I come from a long line of surgeons, beginning with my great-grandfather.
Another memory quickly follows. The two of us in his kitchen, having my blood pressure checked, Nick distracting me with small talk. After I told him the story behind my name, he shared the obvious fact that Nick was short for Nicholas. What he didn’t tell me—not then, not ever—was his last name.
Now I know it.
Bartholomew.
“My great-grandfather’s dream didn’t last very long,” Nick says. “His first task was to find a way to protect the residents in case the Spanish flu ever flared up again. But things went very wrong, very quickly. Some of the same people he was trying to protect got sick. Some even died.”
He doesn’t mention the dead servants. He doesn’t need to. I know what they were.
Test subjects.
The unwilling participants in a mad doctor’s experiment. Infect the poor to heal the rich. Clearly, it didn’t go as planned.
“When it looked like the police might get involved, my great-grandfather felt he had no choice but to end the investigation before it could even begin,” Nick says. “He took his life. But an ouroboros never dies. It’s simply reborn. So when my grandfather left medical school, he chose to continue his father’s work. He was more careful, of course. More discreet. He shifted the focus away from virology to prolonging life. With wealth comes power. Power earns you importance. And the truly important people in the world deserve to live longer lives than those who are beneath them. That’s especially true as we face another epidemic.”
Telling his tale has left Nick energized. Beads of moisture shine along his hairline. Behind his glasses, his eyes gleam. No longer content to sit, he gets up and starts moving about the room
, passing the Monet and the open door and then coming back again.
“Right now, at this very moment, hundreds of thousands of people wait for organ transplants,” he says. “Some of them are important people. Very important. Yet they’re told to just get in line and wait their turn. But some people can’t wait. Eight thousand people a year die waiting for a life-saving organ. Think about that, Jules. Eight thousand people. And that’s just in America alone. What I do—what my family has always done—is provide options for those who are too important to wait like everyone else. For a fee, we allow them to skip that line.”
What he doesn’t say is that letting so-called important people move to the front of the line requires an equal number of unimportant people.
Like Dylan.
Like Erica and Megan.
Like me.
All it takes to get us here is one small ad. Apartment sitter needed. Pays well. Call Leslie Evelyn.
After that, we simply disappear.
Creation from our destruction.
Life from our deaths.
That’s the meaning behind the ouroboros.
Not immortality, but a desperate attempt to spend a few more years eluding the Grim Reaper’s inevitable grasp.
“Cornelia Swanson,” I say. “What was she?”
“A patient,” Nick says. “The first transplant attempt. It went . . . badly.”
So Ingrid and I had it all wrong. This isn’t about Marie Damyanov or the Golden Chalice or devil worship. There is no coven. It’s just a group of dying rich people desperate to save their lives no matter the cost. And Nick is here to facilitate it.
I roll onto my side, the pain shrieking through my body. It’s worth it if it means I no longer have to look at him. Still, I can’t resist asking a few more questions. For clarity’s sake.
“What else are you going to take?”
“Your liver.”
Nick says it with shocking indifference. Like he doesn’t even consider me a human being.
I wonder what he was thinking that night in his bedroom, when I let him kiss me, undress me, fuck me. Even in that moment, was he appraising me, taking stock of what my body offered, wondering how much money I would make him?
“Who’s going to get it?”
“Marianne Duncan,” he says. “She’s in need of one. Badly.”
“What else?”
“Your heart.” Nick pauses then. The only concession to my feelings. “That’s going to Charlie’s daughter. He’s earned it.”
I figured there had to be a reason people like Charlie willingly worked at the Bartholomew. Now I know. It’s a classic quid pro quo, exploited by the upper classes for ages. For doing their dirty work, the little folks will get something in return.
“And Leslie? Dr. Wagner?”
“Our Mrs. Evelyn is a believer in the Bartholomew’s mission,” Nick says. “Her late husband benefitted from a heart transplant during my father’s tenure. When he died—years later than was expected, I might add—she offered to keep things running smoothly. And, of course, she’ll be first in line if she should ever need my services. As for Dr. Wagner, he’s simply a surgeon. A damn good one who lost his license more than twenty years ago after showing up for surgery drunk. My father, in need of assistance due to growing demand, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
“I pity you,” I tell Nick. “I pity you, and I hate you, although not as much as you hate yourself. Because you do. I’m sure of it. You’d have to in order to do what you’re doing.”
Nick pats my leg. “Nice try. But guilt trips don’t work on me. Now take your pills.”
He grabs the paper cup and holds it out to me. I have just enough strength to knock it out of his hand. The cup drops to the floor, the pills bouncing into the corners.
“Please, Jules,” Nick says with a sigh. “Don’t become a problem patient. We can make the rest of your time here comfortable or extremely unpleasant. It’s up to you.”
He leaves quickly after that, letting the pills remain on the floor. The cleanup job falls to Jeannette, who enters the room a minute later dressed in the same purple scrubs and gray cardigan she wore when we first spoke in the basement.
She places new pills on the tray. When she bends down to pick up the ones on the floor, her cigarette lighter slips from her pocket and joins them. Jeannette curses under her breath before scooping it all up.
“Take the pills or get the needle again,” she says while shoving the lighter back into her pocket. “Your choice.”
It’s not much of a choice, considering they share the same purpose, which is more than to simply ease my pain.
It’s sedation.
Sustained weakness.
So when it comes time for the next donation, I’ll go quietly, without fuss.
Staring at the pills, those two tiny eggs in a white-paper nest, I can’t help but think of my parents. They, too, had a choice—to continue fighting a battle they had no chance of winning or to willingly wrap themselves in the sweet embrace of nothingness.
Now I face a similar decision. I can fight back and inevitably lose, making what little time I have left, to use Nick’s words, extremely unpleasant. Or I can make the same choice my parents did.
Give up.
Succumb.
No more pain. No more problems. No more worry and heartache and constant wondering about Jane’s fate. Just a deep, painless slumber in which my family waits for me.
I turn to their photo on the bedside table, their faces crisscrossed by cracks in the glass.
Shattered frame. Shattered family.
I look at them and know which choice to make.
I grab the paper cup and tip it back.
FOUR DAYS LATER
48
They keep the door closed. It’s also locked from the outside. During my rare bouts of wakefulness, I hear the click of the lock before anyone enters. Which is often. People are always coming and going. A veritable parade stomping through my drug-induced slumber.
First up is Dr. Wagner, who checks my vitals and gives me my pills and a breakfast smoothie. I dutifully put the pills in my mouth. I don’t touch the smoothie.
Next are Jeannette and Bernard, who wake me with their chatter while they change my bandages, replace the catheter, swap out the IV bag. From their conversation, I gather that this is a small operation. Just the two of them, Nick, Dr. Wagner, and a night nurse who’s in big trouble after I managed to slip out unnoticed.
There are apparently three patient rooms, all of them currently occupied—a rarity, to hear Jeannette tell it. I’m in one. Greta’s in another. The third is occupied by Mr. Leonard, who only days ago received a new heart.
Although they never mention Dylan by name, I know where that heart came from. Just thinking about it beating inside frail and ancient Mr. Leonard’s stitched-up chest makes me shove a fist in my mouth to keep from screaming.
When I do eventually fall asleep again, it’s with tears in my eyes.
They’re still there when I’m startled awake I-don’t-know-how-many hours later by Greta Manville. The door unlocks, and there she is, no longer in a wheelchair but moving around with the help of a walker. She looks healthier than the last time I saw her. Not as pale, and more robust.
“I wanted to see how you’re doing,” she says.
Even though I’m half-comatose from the little white pills, enough anger courses through me to produce two words.
“Fuck you.”
“I’m not proud of what I’ve done,” Greta says. “What my entire family has done, starting with my grandmother. I know you know about that, by the way. You’re smart enough to have figured it out by now. Then my parents. Kidney disease runs in the family. Both of my parents needed transplants. So when I needed one as well, I returned to this place, knowing its purpose. And its sins. You judge me harshl
y, I know. I deserve to be judged. Just as I deserve your hatred and your desire to see me dead.”
The fog parts. A rare moment of clarity, fueled by anger and hatred. Greta is right about that.
“I want you to live as long as possible,” I say. “Years and years. Because each day you’re alive means one more day you have to think about what you’ve done. And when the rest of your body starts to fail you—and it will, very soon—I hope that small piece of me that’s inside you keeps you alive just a little bit longer. Because death isn’t good enough for you.”
I’m spent after that, sinking into the mattress like it’s quicksand. Greta remains by the bed.
“Go away,” I moan.
“Not yet. There’s a reason I’m here,” she says. “I’m being released to my apartment tomorrow. It’ll be more comfortable for me there. Dr. Nick says being in my own place will speed up my recovery. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Why?”
Greta shuffles to the door. Before closing it behind her, she takes one last look at me and says, “I think you already know the answer.”
And I do, in a hazy, half-conscious way. Her departure means there’ll be room for someone else.
Maybe Marianne Duncan.
Maybe Charlie’s daughter.
Which means I won’t be here by this time tomorrow.
49
I sleep.
I wake.
Bernard—he of the bright scrubs and no-longer-kind eyes—arrives with lunch and more pills. Because I’m too dazed to eat, he uses pillows to prop me up like a rag doll and spoon feeds me soup, rice pudding, and what I think is creamed spinach.
The drugs have made me oddly chatty. “Where are you from?” I say, slurring my words like someone who’s had one too many drinks.
“You don’t need to know that.”
“I know I don’t need to. I want to.”
“I’m not telling you anything,” he says.
“At least tell me who you’re doing this for.”