The Organ Broker

by Stu Strumwasser

  “It’s fine. Don’t sweat it.”

  “That’s why I had to move last year.”

  “Last year?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’d you live before then?”

  “With them.”

  “But you’re thirty.”

  “Yeah. That’s why I had to get the hell out of there.”

  I knew I couldn’t break up with her before New Year’s because doing so would have mandated twice as many late-night phone conversations in order to talk her down. I’d have to wait a couple of weeks. I was driving back on the LIE and trying as hard as I could not to say anything that would initiate more conversation. I was thinking about Tom Walsh. He wanted no part of me, no reminders of what he’d done to stay alive. It made me feel something that I could only describe as “hurt.” I was on my third Maria. Jack Tuckman had no family, no friends from college… . How could he? He hadn’t even existed then.

  ◆

  After the holidays things picked up a bit, as they usually do. It was January of last year, 2010. After I ended things with Maria it seemed that often my phones didn’t ring at all, but when they did, it was usually Wallace. He told me about his fishing trip in the Florida Keys. We were working on a couple of trips to Moldova for kidneys and getting a liver from Royston for a guy named Max from Miami. Max was sick as hell and would die soon no matter what we did but he was intent on taking his game into overtime and Wallace was intent on charging him for it.

  ◆

  “I want to get your input on something,” Wallace said.

  “What’s up?”

  “Is that gmail address good?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Well, around Christmas I emailed a guy who was offering out an altruistic donation on organmatchmaker.com.”

  “Now why would you be on there? Should I be offended?” I asked.

  “Because some things in life are free. It was slow, I was bored, I don’t know … I don’t usually bother with it,” he replied. “But never mind that. We traded an email or two over the last few weeks and today I had an IM chat with him. You won’t believe what this guy just said to me.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I cut and pasted it into an email I just sent you. Take a look.”

  “Hold on,” I said, and reached over to my laptop to open a browser window.

  ◆

  Wallace: Hi. I saw your listing and wanted to get more information. It says you are willing to donate a healthy kidney to the right recipient. And you’re O positive, so you could donate your kidney to almost anyone?”

  TS: Not me. My friend that I am helping … But yes, O positive.

  Wallace: What do you mean, “friend”?

  TS: I have a friend who wants to donate a kidney. I am helping. If you are O positive and a good match—and deserving—we could talk offline about the possibility and the other details.

  Wallace: Well, it’s not about whether I am a match. It’s for a friend. I am also helping a friend.

  TS: I see.

  Wallace: Yes. We seem to both be helping friends. Mine is very anxious to get the kidney he needs. He would be very appreciative.

  TS: That would be apropos. I’m sure my friend would expect gratitude. May I ask your name?

  Wallace: It’s Wallace.

  TS: So then you’re Wallace from Connecticut?

  Wallace: Who are you?

  TS: I am The Siren.

  LONG PAUSE.

  Wallace: Seriously?

  TS: The Siren.

  Wallace: Ha!

  END SESSION.

  ◆

  “This is not good,” I said to him quietly. I was shaking my head a little but he didn’t know that of course.

  “Do you think it’s really him?” Wallace asked.

  “Maybe it’s the Loch Ness Monster.”

  “Jack, seriously. You think that guy could be real?”

  “It’s an urban myth, Wallace.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Does it matter? You can’t do anything about it either way. Even if he were real, then that guy would make the Man from Dallas look cautious. Just burn all the contact info he has of yours and forget it.”

  “But he was offering up a part for free. No offense, Jack, but that’s a bit better than your pricing.”

  “Wallace, he was advertising a part for free. The real offer is still coming. When he gets the buyer on the phone, whoever that guy is, The Siren, or Bigfoot, or Spiderman, he’s going to suddenly need fifty K for ‘expenses’ at some point. I’m not pitching you or trying to make a buck here. We don’t have an exclusive and you’re free to do business with other seller’s agents, but don’t go and bite off a big piece of trouble like this.”

  “You never know …”

  “Wallace, those stories about kidney thieves in Vegas having hookers lure drunk businessmen into hotel rooms, slipping drugs in their drinks and then harvesting kidneys, that’s all nonsense. You know better than that. You need two legit operating theaters to do a nephrectomy and a transplant or it’s murder. That never happens. Never. Why commit murder when you can just pay some poor schlub a grand or two? It’s a fairy tale. ‘The Siren’ is just a nickname for fifty different morons who’ve spouted off in strip bars over the years while making up stories to impress other morons. Burn the fucking contact info and forget it. Really.”

  “Relax, Jack. I already did,” he said with a slight chuckle.

  “Then what’s the point?” I asked, not amused.

  “Just kidding around. Relax, New York.”

  “You testing me?” I asked, half-pissed.

  “Fucking with you.”

  “Well, someone is fucking with you, pal. You are way too loose with who you talk to and who you think might be your friends.”

  ◆

  In 2009 I still resented the risks Wallace took. Soon it will be Christmas 2011. Now I will take the risks. I will be The Siren. That’s how I can fix some of the mess I’ve made. The world’s not watching our business yet but change starts with an event. I will be Columbine. The Rosa Parks of organs. There’s a fiscal cliff approaching in the balance between UNOS and the black market for organs. It might as well be me.

  And soon, I’ll have to meet with Wallace. That’s coming too and it will be my last opportunity to try and change his mind. Can a junkie get clean, can a hungry man skip a meal?—because you ask him to, because it is right and you merely ask him to?—it’s possible, but very unlikely. Those will be my odds with Wallace. Even if I had three million dollars to ask him to walk away from this deal, this bad and different deal we’ve gotten into, it would only be temporary. He’d just lie. Wallace is a man who needs the meter on his bank account always clicking, the balance always growing larger. It isn’t just about the money; he needs the rush. I understand because I’ve been like that for a long time too.

  ◆

  When that last meeting comes—in a hospital lobby—there will be no “New York!” greeting, or “Strange place for a meeting. I hear the food’s not so great.” His hair will be gray at the temples. He’ll look common, a little thicker in the middle these days, no different than any other guy walking down West 168th today thinking about his prostate medicine or whether he’ll make his year-end bonus.

  I imagine our conversation will go something like this:

  “So what’s the problem, Jack?”

  “Don’t you know?” I’ll say.

  “I think I do, but I was hoping I’d be wrong.”

  “This isn’t what we signed up for.” There will be animosity in our eyes, but also affection and regret.

  “I didn’t sign up for anything, New York. I’m just running a business.” Then, he’ll add, “Why would you want to ruin things now, Jack? Now, when there is so much money to be made. We help people, Jack.”

  “Not really. We help some, but only at the expense of others. And this is different. I told you from the beginning this is a different thing.”

 
“It’s getting done, Jack. No matter what you say now it’s still getting done.”

  “What if I asked you not to? Wallace, what if I asked you to leave here, and go get a drink, and tell the client that in the end you just couldn’t get the part? Could you do that? Could you consider that maybe we’ve taken enough and just go get that drink with me instead?”

  He’ll look at me, concerned and also sorry, but mostly he’ll be unflappable. I know that’s what will happen. There’s a chance that I am wrong, but it is very unlikely. So I’ll have my answer and it will not be a surprise. Not yet. But soon. I feel it coming and it carries with it the same kind of rush. I am going to stop him. I am going to burn Royston and Wolff and Pierre and maybe in the end it won’t change much, maybe they’ll be typing out thousands of people in advance in the streets of some poor province in India soon. Maybe they’ll be taking blood samples from all new prisoners in Russia soon—especially the ones who wrote disparaging articles about Putin—but not in Sandton. We can only imagine what they’re already doing behind closed doors in North Korea where the only national export we know of is missiles. Shit—I could probably consult for those guys … So perhaps things won’t change. But I can. I will change, and for that I do feel lucky.

  PART IV: HOW THINGS START SOMETIMES

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN:

  MARK

  In January of this year I met Mark. It was about a month after the shit with Marlene Brown and only a couple of weeks after I got back from Jozi and my trip to the farm at Alexandra. We were busy, but things between Wallace and I were still awkward and tense. It was raining that day; warm for winter but still cold. The rain was being blown horizontally, drifting into the sides of buildings and under everyone’s cheap, disposable, New York-deli umbrellas, soaking the legs of their pants. I was on my cell phone, opening the interior door of a diner where I had just eaten, and he was standing between the interior and exterior doors where he later explained he had been waiting for me to finish eating for twenty minutes.

  “Jack?” he said, casually. Alarms went off but I didn’t flinch and just kept walking past him, pushing outward on the exterior glass door and stepping out onto the wet and dirty sidewalk. Mark walked up right beside me and said, “Jack?” and then, “Jack,” again. So I stopped, turned toward him—nervous about pretending to not hear him since he had been clear and forceful—and motioned with an index finger for him to wait a minute.

  I said, “Yes. Fine,” into my phone. “I’ll call you then. When I’m back in the office. I’m on the street now,” or some other random thing to whomever I’d been talking to. We looked at each other for a few seconds and I wasn’t just nervous; I was flat-out scared. I thought I was getting arrested and I became afraid, for a moment, that maybe I was even about to get killed.

  He was dressed in a worn black leather jacket, some sort of stylish jeans, and black shoes, but he had no hat or umbrella. He was ruffled from the rain. He looked far too young to be an FBI agent, too young even to be a regular cop—and that worried me. I thought he might be the relative of some unhappy customer who wanted a rebate, maybe a few organs of my own. So I smiled confidently, shook my head just slightly, and said, “Do I? … I’m sorry, but …”

  Mark looked frozen. He was a beautiful young man, fully grown but still appearing genuine enough to be a kid. He stood on the sidewalk in front of a wondrous New York backdrop. There were trucks and taxis and shoes stamping through puddles and expletives being shouted off down the block and the wind-whipped raindrops. Mark said nothing at all. I thought for a second that perhaps I should run but instead I extended my hand and asked, “Do I know you?”

  “Look, Jack. Please …” He was shaking his head up and down then.

  “What?” I asked with another broad smile, feeling comforted somehow and yet a little panicked too. He seemed to be alone. There didn’t seem to be anyone else on the sidewalk or in a parked car watching us. I noticed some paint on the fingers of his hand. Some blue and specks of yellow. I didn’t think he was a cop.

  “You know me,” he said, maybe starting to tear up a little. I was trying to survey the sidewalk across from us.

  “No. I don’t think so.” There were sirens exploding in my head then.

  “Well, you know my mom, Carrie Franco. You know her, right?

  The smile lingered on my moronic face. I know it did. I might have tilted my head, just a little, like a puzzled dog, but that was all. If I could have done it, perhaps I would have cocked one ear. It bought me a second or two. Mark looked a little over twenty. A little over twenty years since Carrie. Could it really have been twenty years? Could this be? Carrie had said that she didn’t want me to come with her to the doctor if it turned out that she was pregnant. She had stopped doing coke—I thought it had been about us. She moved back to Boston to be with her parents… .

  It only took a moment for me to understand that I had a son, that I had miscalculated, that I had missed it all and fucked up everything more than I even knew. And I smiled and shook my head up and down and that kid must have felt sick from the sight of me. Maybe he knew I actually considered running. Mark. Just like his mother, twenty-two years before him. I kept my grip on his hand. I was afraid to let go and let him slip back to Boston or wherever he might go to. I have never been so surprised or caught off guard. I felt a little dizzy. It made sense that I found him so appealing in the first instant I had seen him. I had thought, what a nice-looking kid who’s come to arrest me.

  ◆

  “So how is she?” I asked once we were back inside the diner, working as hard as I could not to sound hopeful. I was trying to remain settled, but it was hard. I was not surprised to discover that I still cared, over twenty years later, but I was surprised by the force and speed with which it swelled up inside of me.

  “She’s good,” he said, with a very slight smile that displayed some grace beyond his years. And pride. Shouldn’t he be freaking out too? But he was not. After just a moment he seemed calm, composed, and relieved. He sat with his hands clasped on the table in front of him, sitting still and appearing comfortable. I was stirring my coffee, taking small sips, adding sugar several times. “I mean, generally she’s good,” he added, like an afterthought. “I haven’t spoken to them in a few weeks.”

  I nodded, and I guess Mark somehow surmised that it was a question and then added, “My parents. ‘Them’ being my parents. Mom got married when I was three and my stepdad raised me. I call him ‘Dad’ and all.” It sounded almost rehearsed and I wondered if he had thought about what he might say to me for a while, maybe even for years … Then he added, “But I haven’t talked to them in a while. Been kinda pissed. Because of this. Because of you and wanting to meet you.”

  “They’re angry?”

  “More that I am,” he replied. Then he added, “Jack,” as if to amuse himself, or perhaps to somehow insult me. We were on a first-name basis. We were meeting for the first time. I was his father. The guy who had wiped his ass and gone to all the Little League games and paid the bills … not him. No, I was actually his father. Jack. Some guy across the table at this diner.

  “You’re angry because Carrie didn’t want you to meet me?” I asked. “Because she didn’t tell you who I am sooner?”

  Mark has eyelashes as long as a woman’s. I remember looking at him then and thinking about that rule: “The more a man looks like a woman the more attractive he is, but the more a woman looks like a man the less attractive she is.” I remember noticing how simply attractive his face is. I was thinking, “He’s probably normal and well-liked and invested in life,” and hoping it was true. I was thinking that I couldn’t deny him the chance to talk to me and get some answers, but also that I had an obligation to get away without upsetting the creation that Carrie had set in motion. I didn’t want to poison the fact that he was Carrie’s son, and not mine.

  “I’m pissed off …” he finally began. “I guess I’m pissed at my mom because, well, you knew her. I doubt she’s really all th
at different now from when you knew her. I mean, people don’t really change, right? My mom’s pretty cool. You probably understand that. And we have this honest sort of relationship.” He paused and looked up at me, conducting a further evaluation, perhaps beginning to see the disappointing truth. “When this stuff about Ken not being my biological father first came up I was around ten or eleven. It was hard for a while. After that, my mother’s story was always that she literally didn’t know who my father was. She had been seeing a few men, she wasn’t proud, she was doing some drugs at the time… . She admitted all this shit. But she loved me more than everything else and she moved back in with my grandparents in Boston and got it together—for me—and not long after she met Ken Carson. And we’re okay. You know?” he said with a bit of a self-conscious grin. Actually, Mark always seems a bit self-conscious. “But she always told me she didn’t know who my father is. A couple of months ago I turned twenty-one. She gave me a letter she had written to me just a few months after I was born. A big part of that letter explained her mindset at the time and why she wouldn’t tell me who my real father is until I was an adult. When I turned twenty-one.”

  “She was trying to protect you.”

  “Yeah … that’s kinda bullshit,” he said quietly. “She wrote this letter. She said that she wanted to put it all down and tell the truth and let me judge it all for myself, when I turned twenty-one. I think it’s sort of self-righteous—the way she claims that she didn’t want to influence my opinion, my judgment of her—it’s just as much about her.”

  “Everyone lies,” I said.

  “Exactly.” When he said that, he really did look like a kid, young and beautiful and wreckable. “Look, I go to Columbia, Jack. I’m a senior. I’ve been living in New York for almost four years and I never even knew you were here. And she tried to preempt me with some bullshit letter she wrote twenty years ago, when I was a baby, because she’s a good lawyer and she planned her defense out in advance. And she lied to me.”

  “What’s with the paint?” I said, pointing to his hand.