Colson has “10 MILLION$” tattooed in gothic script across his forehead, but of course he’s not worth a fraction of that, not when he’s slugging gallons of cloudy rotgut that’s like drain cleaner on his insides. Every time I see him, Colson taps the scars over his liver and says, “It keeps coming back, man. Unkillable. Gonna buy a Ferrari.”
I never have the heart to tell him the liver regrows in different ways after each donation. That the blood vessels are never in the same place twice. You can donate four, maybe five times before the surgeons can’t image the tissue anymore. Colson would understand that if he bothered to watch anything on the web other than porn.
But I’m not much better. I have a chart on my phone. Column A lists the organs I’ve given up, the bags and vials I’ve filled with blood and sperm and marrow and hair. Column B breaks down the cash I’ve earned for it.
I’ve made a hundred grand so far.
When I hit a million, I’m leaving the state. I’ll pass a wad of new twenties to whatever lucky bastard’s manning the border checkpoint, and I’ll drive into my new life with a smile. You can buy a small house in a cool city with a million bucks. Last night they were burning the fields beyond the big box stores near my place, and I think I smelled roasting meat, like they were setting another pile of bodies afire.
On Sunday afternoon, I meet Colson in an off-brand burrito place near my apartment. There are a few mutants like Colson in every town in America. For a stunningly cheap price, they’ll sell you anything you need—provided you need questionable coke, even more questionable pills, or a pistol that might explode when you squeeze the trigger. I’ve purchased pharmaceuticals from him before, which he must not remember, because he promptly launches into his speech about how he’s going to hit the top of the Marketplace’s leaderboard, where a woman named Martina Royal currently sits in first place with $7 million.
I’ve heard his spiel at least three times, and I’m tired of it. “Martina Royal, she opted to die,” I say. “They sold all her marrow, all her DNA, all her organs. You don’t strike me as a guy on a one-way trip, which is going to limit your earning power.”
“You’re a weird…” he says, and trails off, and turns his head to squint at his business partner sitting at a nearby table. The other guy has a tattoo of an Iron Cross on his right cheek, and his new leather jacket gleams like oil in the restaurant’s grease-smeared lighting. “What are you?”
“I’m undefined,” I say, trying to resist the urge to touch my freshly shorn head. “I decided to give up the whole gender thing.”
“Then this isn’t a very kind place for you to live,” he says.
“You’re telling me,” I say, leaning forward. “I need you to get me something. I’ll pay big.”
“Yeah? We’re doing some business?”
“If you want.” I take a deep breath, exhale loudly. “I need plastic explosive. Enough to take out a big steel door. I’ve been saving up. I can afford it.”
Colson doesn’t usually source that kind of ordinance, but I know he’s childhood friends with Big Dick Rick, who runs the Crimson Militia out of a warehouse a few miles from here. Big Dick Rick thinks his merry little band of weekend warriors is a force for preserving liberty amidst an imploding nation, but they’re really just a bunch of slow dudes who like to blow up poor, defenseless squirrels in the woods. I know they have enough C-4 and dynamite to send a skyscraper to the moon like a steel rocket.
“I can maybe find that for you,” Colson says. “But what I really don’t like is the heat it might bring. What do you need it for?”
I tell him, and his eyes widen, and I sense him resisting the urge to glance at his partner. They must think I’m a moron to share info this valuable, and that’s fine. That’s perfect, in fact. “Get it to me by Tuesday afternoon at the latest, and I’ll give you a big cut. I need it that night,” I tell him, and a sharp but familiar pain razors through my guts, making me wince. The doctors say that kind of agony is a direct effect of coring out my insides for profit, but it always erupts at moments like this, and I can’t help but think it’s my body begging me to rethink things.
•••
Back in the day, you donated organs out of the goodness of your heart, no money exchanged. That was before our governor decided the wise hand of the market needed to get involved. Auctions and cash payouts mean more organs, he said. And more organs will mean more lives saved.
In between signing a law that legalized the use of grenade launchers in hunting, and another banning pregnant women from leaving the state, the governor opened the country’s first Life Marketplace, where bidding for a liver started at forty grand. I made most of my money in the first couple weeks, when I sold off my left kidney and several pints of blood and even some cartilage.
Those were the good times, before so many people flooded onto the Marketplace that prices crashed, boom, and suddenly you could pick up a liver lobe or a length of intestine or even a heart or a pair of lungs for cheap. People with no future were happy to die, so long as it meant their donated bits were transformed into hard cash for their families.
We live in America, the governor growled during one memorable press conference. And in America, we’re free to make choices.
Yeah, right.
Ask someone with ninety grand on their mortgage and another seven grand on their car note if they have any choice except the worst one. Especially if their job was just replaced by software and the only work they can get is a chicken slaughterhouse gig where you make minimum wage if you’re lucky, no benefits. I just described half the people in this state. As for anyone who’s never felt that kind of fear or hunger—trust me, if it comes down to your eyeballs or keeping a roof over your kids’ heads, you’ll say goodbye to both peepers.
After my meeting with Colson, I sign onto the state’s website and select what I’m willing to part with:
A chunk of my liver.
A section of my pancreas.
Some marrow.
A lot of blood.
I select an EzSpeedy operation where they take everything at once. It’s the height of medical tourism season and the airports are full of private jets, rich folks flying from around the world for the best organs the Midwest can offer.
I activate the auction. Within a few minutes, my seven pounds of flesh have a package bid for thirty grand, but the one good thing about the Marketplace is you can dangle your bits out there for as long as you want, see if a late bidder is willing to pay a little more. That rarely happens, given the hundreds of desperate souls flooding the exchange.
I need that wise hand of the market to push a little harder in my direction.
Good thing I have a plan.
•••
My cousin Bethany is a typical cop in a backwater like ours. Her white cowboy hat is more ridiculous than the oversized tactical vest she wears everywhere, its loops and pockets heavy with spare clips, smoke grenades, tasers, pistols, telescoping batons, and pepper spray. She likes to wear the vest while she does pushups, and she does pushups anywhere she can, even in the middle of this strip mall parking lot.
“Hold up,” she grunts as she pistons up and down. “Gotta get in my hundred.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Gotta stay fit.”
“Shit, don’t sass me,” she says as she finishes, springing to her feet despite the jangling weight. “I’ll throw your ass in jail, family or no. What’s with that stupid haircut?”
“I’m becoming someone new,” I offer, and she smirks.
“Nobody changes, not really,” she says. “You throw enough people in jail, you learn that.”
The mall’s largest storefront belongs to the state’s family services office. It’s a quarter to seven on Monday morning and the line of angry people already stretches from the office’s door and around the edge of the parking lot to the driveway. Next door sits a massive weed store, where you can stock up on edibles and vapes after a bureaucrat denies your benefits yet again. Bethany is one of the cops tasked with crowd control, but she seems way more interested in her exercise set.
“You want to get off guard duty?” I ask.
She squints at me. “What?”
“I know you don’t want to be here,” I say, nodding at the line. “But you’re stuck until they clear you for killing that dude, right?”
Her hundred pushups barely winded her, but mentioning the shooting makes her face turn bright red, the veins throbbing on her forehead. “Listen here, you stupid shit,” she hisses, jabbing a hard finger into my sternum. “Some liberal deepfaked my bodycam, okay? And I’ll prove it. I don’t know why they even make us wear those dumb things.”
She’s not wearing her bodycam now, which is a violation of regulations. I raise my hands in surrender. “Okay, I hear you,” I say. “I’m here to help.”
“Yeah? How?”
“I was at work, and I heard two guys talking about doing a robbery tonight. One of them is my coworker, he’s a prick, so I figured I’d tell you. It sounded big.”
“Yeah?” She tilts her head. “What you want, a reward? Last I checked, they don’t give those out for doing your civic duty.”
“No,” I say, and swallow hard. “I just…want to talk to Sean again. You’re still tight with him, right? Just have him call me. I want to tell him some things.”
Her expression softens, the Hard Cop replaced by the little girl I used to patrol the woods alongside, so many years ago. It makes me feel bad about what’s about to happen, but only a little. “I can make that happen,” she says. “Now give me everything.”
As I tell her, I make a point of remembering the bodycam footage she says is faked, the blameless kid jerking and jumping as her bullets slice through him. She’s not that little girl anymore. She’s someone who hurts people.
Then again, so am I.
•••
I’ve lost so many parts, my body thinks it’s a sinking ship. I wake up sweating, adrenaline sizzling through my veins, my stomach boiling in acid, my heart thrashing like a hanging man’s legs.
I can climb out of bed and pop a few pills and smoke a joint and play a video game where I’m impossibly huge and fast, the world collapsing before my strength. Some nights, that helps. On the nights it doesn’t help, I drive. I make my way south, into the darkness beyond the city. The eyes shining in my headlights might belong to a deer or a ghost—it’s hard to tell when I’m driving at eighty with tears in my eyes.
I always pass the church where I spent too much time as a kid, its walls white as bone. Sometimes I park across the road and stare at the void of its front door and try to imagine the rattlesnakes in their cages behind the pulpit, their sharp tongues flicking the air. I remember the preacher telling everyone to take Christ’s body and blood if they want salvation.
They said I was a devil because I liked to read.
They said I was a devil because I didn’t want to grow out my hair.
They said I was a devil because I questioned everything.
I waited too long to escape, and when I did, I slipped out at midnight. I took my mom’s car, putting it in neutral and coasting all the way down our long dirt lane to the road before I dared to start the engine and drive off. I figured she’d never call the cops, because the car was a chop-shop special from her latest boyfriend, who was an asshole drunk but drove like a furious angel.
I was lost in the larger world. What do you call someone with no formal education who’s too meek to do scams? Who can quote useless facts from the books they hid behind the kitchen wall, but doesn’t know how to do anything useful?
Answer: anything you want, provided you have the cash.
I’ve sold my body in all sorts of ways.
Go ahead, ask me about my self-loathing.
I’ll tell you nothing feels worse than leaving my little brother Sean behind. I tried to take him with me, even packed his favorite toys and snacks in a backpack, but he said he wanted to stay with Jesus and the snakes.
I’m sure they beat him like they did me.
I’m sure they burned him like they did me.
I’m sure they—
I don’t like to think about it.
Whenever I’m sitting in my car across from the church, I pull out my phone. Last year, I bought Sean’s number off a data-scraping site, and I sit there with my thumb hovering over the call icon, daring myself to ring him. To explain. To beg forgiveness, maybe. Except I’m still a coward.
•••
I set all this in motion, so I must bear witness. That’s what I tell myself as I scramble up the steep hillside, my knees scraped raw on wet rock, my palms shredded by thorns as I push through the brush. On the ridge, I find a boulder flat enough to sit, and there I catch my breath and pop open an energy drink. From here, I have a panoramic view of the two-lane highway snaking through the forest below. Two miles away, the road dips past a concrete building surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, its windowless flanks brightened by security lights on tall poles.
I pull out my phone and call Colson, who answers on the first ring. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, I just wanted to check on the status of my shit,” I say. “Tomorrow’s Tuesday, remember?”
Through the phone, I hear the rumble of tires, a faint voice barking orders. “Yeah, we’ll have it,” Colson says. “You said this place was off highway 10?”
“Yeah. Like I told you, it’s where the highway patrol stores the drugs they take, all the cash,” I say, worried that I’m pouring it on too thick, that he’ll smell a setup. Except Colson’s five beers short of a six pack, and he’s hungry for what he thinks is my score.
“Got it,” Colson says, and giggles. “Sure, man, we’ll have all that for you. I’ll text time and place for a meet.”
He disconnects the call before I can reply. I bet they’re on the way. On Sunday, I told Colson I needed the stuff on Tuesday, so in his simple mind, that means swooping in the night before. My hands shake as I slip the phone into my pocket and sip my drink.
The sun impales itself on the horizon’s jagged trees and bleeds out, staining the sky red. It’s dark a few minutes after that. My sweaty shirt clings to my old scars and makes them itch. If they ever find where the soul lives in the body, what would they sell it for? Would anyone want one as ruined as mine?
Headlights pierce the gloom below. Big Dick Rick’s infamous red muscle car leads four battered pickups, their beds swarming with armored bodies. Flickering lights play over bearish guys strapped into flak vests, their heads encased in old military helmets, their paws gripping shotguns and rifles and larger weapons I don’t recognize. They disappear around a bend, and I shift my gaze farther down the road.
The curve beside the building erupts with red and blue lights. Three cruisers and the black hulk of a SWAT van screech onto the two-lane, tiny dots of cops rushing into position. Bethany among them, no doubt.
The muscle car reappears fifty yards from the roadblock, its brakes screeching loud enough for me to hear on the ridge. The pickups stop behind it, militia folk scattering into the woods on either side of the highway. A man yells something lost in a crackle of gunfire.
I resist the urge to duck. There’s no way a stray bullet could hit me at this distance, right?
The night flashes bright as day, followed by an echoing boom that slams pain into my eardrums.
Sure, I expected Colson to tell the Crimson Militia about my “robbery,” and I expected Big Dick Rick and his buddies to roll out with enough firepower to demolish a medium-sized town, and I expected Bethany to summon every trigger-happy cop within a hundred-mile radius—but I didn’t expect someone to set off a bomb big enough to make Oppenheimer grin. A greasy ball of flame boils skyward, and in its hellish glow I see the fence knocked down, the building reduced to a scorched husk. The security lights flicker and die.
I bet Colson is a cloud of meat particles drifting toward the upper atmosphere, but if he were still whole, I’d tell him the building had no drugs, no weapons, no stacks of seized cash—just the computer servers used by the state to run the Life Marketplace.
The big tech companies in California, they won’t do business with a state that handcuffs pregnant women trying to board airplanes, so the governor had to build his own data bunker in the middle of nowhere.
When I slapped together my screwball plan, I figured Big Dick Rick and Meal Team Six would make it inside the building before Bethany and the cops closed in. If everything went my way, the resulting chaos would wreck a few servers, slowing new bids, thus jacking the price for my parts. Supply and demand, baby.
But what happens if the building’s destroyed?
I scramble down the hill in the dark, my lungs burning before I’m halfway down, panicked that I might have screwed everything up. When I reach my car parked on the shoulder of the road, I pull out my phone and swipe to the Marketplace, which is down, of course. Maybe for a long time.
I unlock the car and climb into the driver’s seat and lean forward until my forehead rests against the rim of the steering wheel. I want to scream. I’m God’s ultimate fuckup, aren’t I?
My phone rings. Unknown number. I answer it. “Yeah?”
A lightly accented voice launches into it without preamble. “Are you the organ donor willing to give up, liver, pancreas, blood? Twenty-one years old, no known health issues?”
“Yeah?” I sit up. “Who is this?”
“There has been an incident with the marketplace. We have no details of what happened, but my client is in urgent need of medical donation, and we found your name on the cached version of the site. We are willing to pay for rush service. What are you willing to bid?”
The number rolls off my tongue before I can think about it. “One million.”
A long pause. I hear—or imagine I hear—the rustle of papers, a soft cough. “That’s quite a premium,” the voice offers. “How about seven hundred thousand? A significant markup from your previous price. There are others on the list.”
Except the list won’t add new names anytime soon, which makes me a precious commodity for the first time in my miserable existence. “Yeah, but I’m the donor who’ll drive to you right this second,” I say. “I’m a known quantity. And that price is fine.”
Seven hundred grand is way better than nothing. I picture living on a street in a bright-muraled town with good breweries where I can let my freak flag fly, and it takes all my self-control to hold back a feral cackle.
The man on the phone sighs. “We are agreed, then. McNeil Hospital, do you know where it is? Can you be there in an hour, no less? We will transfer the funds then.”
“See you there,” I say, starting the car. “Pleasure doing business with you.”
As I rumble away from the devastation, my rearview mirror frames reddish smoke boiling above the trees. I feel a little sorry for Bethany if she didn’t survive, but if that’s the case, at least she died doing what she loved—filling people with lead.
And if anyone ever figures out what I’ve done, they might curse me as a devil, but I’m starting to think whether you’re an angel or a devil is just a matter of perspective.
My phone buzzes. Another unknown number. I answer it. “Hello?”
“Bro?”
It’s Sean.
Oh my God, it’s Sean.
I want to tell him about my past, how I offered up my body and blood in exchange for my salvation, or maybe his forgiveness, even if he didn’t know what I was doing. My body is my church, I’ll say, and if he laughs I’ll know we have a chance at a relationship, and if he curses me out I’ll know I can leave the state without looking back.
There’s so much empty space in me that needs to be filled.
“Hey,” I tell him, ready to meet my future.
