Repo Men (23 page)

My hands firmly clenched around the handles of the shock pads, I pressed the unit into Captain K’s hairy chest, and, with a flourish, depressed the thumb buttons that would send the beautiful streams of electricity racing through his body.

And that’s when my heart stopped.

Oh
, I thought indifferently
. So this is what it feels like.
And that takes care of the fourth time I was ever knocked unconscious.

I was legally dead for an hour.

“Last job took you down,” Asbury said in a low whisper as I neared the end of my story.

“Third to last,” I replied. “I still had a few more on the docket. If I would have ever made the transfer at all, I don’t know. But, yeah, that’s how it happened. Somehow the defib unit got reversed, the wires got crossed. A glitch in the system. The shock hit me instead of the client.”

Bonnie ran her hand along my back, edging herself closer. “But you lived,” she said.

“More or less,” I said. “The warehouse manager for the building had forgotten a file back at his desk, so he drove in to pick it up. Saw my car, saw the light on inside, called security, and soon enough they were carting me off to the hospital.”

“Which is where,” Asbury concluded, “they dropped your ’forg.”

I nodded. “They brought me in dead, they shipped me out alive. Came in on a gurney, full cardiac arrest, and they knew there was too much dead tissue on my own ticker to get it running again. Hospital policy called for an artiforg implantation, and so they went at it, picking out the newest Jarvik model for me. By that point, someone had seen my tattoo and figured out I was a Union stooge, so they were sure to give me extra-special care.

“I woke up in the intensive care wing to find my Union supervisor and my buddy Jake standing over me, bearing gifts and flowers and swearing like hell that they’d treat me just like they always did, that they wouldn’t let my new situation get in the way of our working relationship.”

“And did they?” asked Bonnie.

“More or less. These days, mostly less.”

It was only a day later that they came to me with the papers to sign, the fabled yellow sheet documentation. I scribbled where I was supposed to and the assigned Union salesman pulled off the yellow copy to reveal the pink sheet below, which he quickly folded into a compartment in his briefcase. That pink sheet would be ferried back to the shop and kept on file until the Jarvik had been paid off, or until it got assigned to a Bio-Repo man for collection.

Naturally, I tried to put it out of my mind. Unfortunately, not trying to think about a pink sheet is like not trying to think about a pink elephant. Go ahead, try either one.

Wendy had to take out a second mortgage on a lake home that had been in her family for generations. But the down payment was taken care of, so all I had to worry about was the thousands of dollars a month it would take to keep my heart ticking and my credit in the clear. There was no possible way that a sales gig was going to allow me to pay off all my alimony, keep Wendy and me in the house we’d just managed to afford in the first place, and continue payments on my brand-new heart. A desk job was out of the question.

I’d have to go back to repo.

My hospital stay was short; the day after I signed the Union loan papers, they shipped me back home to work on the rest of my recuperation. They said I’d be allowed to move around in a week, be back on the job in a month. After fourteen days of staring at the television screen, I made the decision to ignore my physicians. I went back to work.

Everyone at the Union was glad to see me; I got back slaps all around. But as I walked through the corridors of the main offices, I could sense a shift in tone, as my co-workers would look at me and wonder if I’d be the next poor sap on their pink sheets. Like I’d finally given up and had a sip of the Kool-Aid.

Frank was surprised to see me back so soon. He hadn’t expected me for at least another week. “I don’t know what I’ve got for you,” he told me. “All the Level Five jobs are assigned already.”

“Then give me a Level Four,” I said. “I got Union merchandise in me now; I need the cash.”

After an hour of badgering, I got him to assign me to a chain job, taking off limb prosthetics. I was sent into the field with two Level Ones, nineteen-year-old recent trainees working the early, easy jobs. The kind of thing that any street thug could do, only with the benefit of a neck brand and legal protection.

One of the kids, a six-footer named Ian, was properly scared of me. He’d just been promoted from a gig working the Harry the Heart costume out front, and had watched me come back to the shop multiple times with blood on my hands and scars on my skin. He had a romantic and inflated notion of what the job was about, and deep in his heart of hearts, believed that it would make him a better man.

The other was a ruffian called Garrett, who didn’t so much speak as he did grunt or laugh, as he did bray. His main goal in getting his hands dirty seemed to be getting his hands dirty. To be fair, a lot of Bio-Repo guys liked the bloody aspects of the job; it was never something that particularly appealed to me, but I recognize that the career draws applicants from a certain psychological pool. Garrett came from somewhere near the shallow end.

The job was an arm and leg prosthetic, both left side of the body, off a guy who’d lost a fight with a freight train. Something about a crossing, a malfunctioning guard gate, and a settlement with the county, which paid off the 20 percent down and five years of payments, but after that, it all went to hell.

I showed Ian and Garrett how to gas down the house—Ian watching every move of mine with almost fanatical interest, Garrett clearly wishing he could just bash down the door and take the guy head-to-head—and we moved in.

Once inside, we found Mr. Ewen, our client, facedown in a bowl of tofu, and his pretty wife faceup on her back. While Ian and I prepped the client, Garrett took his time examining the missus, and I grabbed him just before he started getting handsy. “Molest the innocent on your own time,” I told him, grabbing him by the collar and forcing him back onto the job. “The Union ain’t paying you to grope.”

Teaching’s never been a specialty of mine, but I took the time to impart my years of knowledge to the kids, showing the best places to cut and remove the implants in the least amount of time, shedding the fewest pints of blood.

But when it came time to make the first incision, my hand shook. Just a bit, but it was there, a distinct tremble where before there was only solid, swift motion. I ignored it and pressed on, and soon enough we were in deep and doing our job. But as I cut and grabbed, working alongside these teenagers, these people who would one day replace me, I couldn’t shake it from my mind. My hand had trembled. There it was. The beginning of the end.

“And then…?” asked the Outsider. “They rip your cord, or what?”

I shook my head. Too much information divulged already. “No, I got jobs, all right.”

“So what’s the problem? Scoring gigs, pulling cash…?”

“Got one job too many,” I said, and left it at that.

Asbury was about to ask a follow-up, but Bonnie—dear Bonnie, who is sitting beside me as I write this, reading some arcane artiforg instruction manual—shot him a no-no glance, and he backed off. Instead, he wandered back into his kitchen and rummaged through a drawer, papers flying through the air. Eventually, the Outsider came up with a pencil and scribbled something down on a blank notepad.

It was an address; he gave it to Bonnie. “You flip over here, find a gal named Rhodesia, and they’ll hole you up right.”

I caught a glimpse of the paper—it was an address on Greendale Street, one that I recognized from my past. “That’s the Gabelman supply house,” I said. “Are you insane?”

Asbury laughed and tossed me a liver. It was a Taihitsu, top of the line. “The Outsider’s got insiders, repo man. Supplies is top of the pops for holing—’forgs all got serials on ’em, so you can’t get scanned.”

He was right. Like the liver I held in my hand, every artiforg sitting on a supply house shelf was already outfitted with a ping chip; any scanner trying to pick up my heart would also register the thousands of other organs surrounding me. Even Jake, with his scanner tricked to the moon, would have difficulty locating us inside the Gabelman compound. It would be like trying to find a haystack in a pile of haystacks.

But a Union-affiliated supply house wouldn’t do as a permanent place of residence, and Asbury knew it. He turned to Bonnie and said, “You keep tight for a few spins, then flip over and find me. I’ll crunch up some new digs.”

She gave him a hug—chaste, not lingering—and passed him down the line. I went to shake the man’s hand, but he pulled me tight and wrapped his arms around my shoulders. “Take care of her,” he said, falling out of dialect for the first time. “You do that good, and you and me will be all right.”

Will do, Asbury.

Wendy knew I was leaving. I didn’t want to crush her like my four ex-wives had crushed me, so I told her up front, leveled with her. The bills had gotten out of hand, my career as a Bio-Repo man was all but officially over, and they’d be coming for my Jarvik as soon as the last issuance of Final Notice went past the thirty-day grace period.

“You can find another job,” she protested. “In another field.”

“No training,” I said. “I’m too old to start up again.”

“And you can’t…you can’t go back to the Union? They want you, I know that. You could do a few more jobs, we could eat light, pay off the heart sooner…”

She was right; the Union did want me back. After I healed up, my supervisor was true to his word and started assigning me Level Five jobs once again. They would have loved to see me continue doing what I did best, and they would have paid me terribly well for it, just as they had been doing all those years. Probably would have made me a Level Six, too. But I couldn’t do it anymore.

Lucky me. I lost a heart and found a soul.

I
t’s late.

The Gabelman supply house is a sprawling industrial complex, a conglomeration of different manufacturers under one common roof, sharing utilities and factory space, often pitching in to offset the combined overhead. Most of the American boutique artiforg manufacturers fall under the Gabelman umbrella, including Struthers, Thompson, and Vocom. Struthers, for example, has resisted expansion for years, despite their award-winning line of epiglottises. Every time they win a Rachman design award, the offers come pouring in, and eager investors clamor for the company to go public. But the Struthers family, which in previous generations had been manufacturers of fine wooden baby furniture, has been putting out some of the best handmade organs for twenty years now, and a large market sale could only hurt the corporation. Same with Thompson, Vocom and the rest; they want to stay small enough to keep the company, yet be able to have a large-enough distribution system to go up against full-scale competitors like Taihitsu and Marshodyne.

That’s where Gabelman comes in. They act as a middleman, of sorts, making the boutique organs available to the general public, as well as to lending houses like Kenton and the Credit Union. Of course, both of these organizations have their own artiforg manufacturing plants as well, but they’re happy to lend out anyone’s organs if the client’s got a down payment and credit to match.

Confusing, and that’s how they like it. An enterprise schematic of the modern artiforg industry would splinter all over the chart like a drunken spider’s web. It’s nothing more than corporate incest, and these houses are the kissin’ cousins of the business world.

But it all makes for a hell of a place to hide. The warehouse aisles are 20 feet high, stretching for 30 yards in each direction before doubling back and doing it all again on the next row over. Three shelves per aisle, each one 6 feet deep, perfect for full-body rest, a king-size bed stretching as far as the natural eye can see. These warehouses are nothing but overgrown hangars with a wholesaler’s flair for design, and if the stories around the Union are true, the buildings that now house the Gabelman artiforgs were once used by the U.S. military to engineer stealth devices during the twentieth century.

I don’t know about that. I do know that the fourth shelf on the left, three tiers up, is an excellent place to get some typing done. The echo is muffled by a fortress of surrounding artiforgs, a wall of livers and hearts and eyeballs and spleens that took me an hour to construct, and would take only an errant tug on the wrong pancreas to undo. It is not a toy. Bonnie has already been reprimanded more than once.

We’d arrived at the back entrance of the Gabelman complex an hour after leaving Asbury’s; his friend was waiting there for us, red carpet and all. A security guard, nothing fancy, running her part of the operation from inside the three-foot-by-three-foot guardhouse. “Come inside,” Rhodesia hissed as we approached. “Don’t run.”

“We’re not,” said Bonnie.

“Just don’t.”

She hustled us inside and down a long corridor, leading us past shelves filled with the best of what the modern artiforg corporations had to offer.

“This is a backup facility,” Rhodesia explained. “They don’t come in here ’less there’s a big crunch on merchandise, and then they call me ahead of time.”

“Doesn’t anybody check it?” I asked.

“They is me, and no, I do not. You’ll be safe for a couple of days.”

So we’re huddled up here, waiting out our time. Bonnie is busy leafing through instruction manuals as I type, looking over my shoulder every now and then to get in a quick peek. I don’t mind. After every glance, we kiss. Tonight, I hope, more will follow.

Bonnie just saw me type that last bit. Her face registered surprise at first, that delicate mouth falling into an open
O
, but it was all for show. Bonnie nodded slowly, leaned in close, and now I know what an artificial tongue tastes like: honey.

Silicone, too, but mainly honey.

Out of all my ex-wives, Melinda and I had the most adventurous sex life. She was insatiable at times, in heat more often than I could cool her down, and even those days when I came home from work with knuckles dragging along the ground became wild nights in bed. Or in the car. Or in the park. Or the grocery store.

It all slowed down after Peter was born, but I attribute it more to our dissolving understanding of each other than to the birth of our son. We could have bought a puppy instead and still been divorced two years later. Melinda was increasingly under the impression that I was selfish, that I didn’t listen to her needs. I was increasingly under the impression that she whined an awful lot.

But some things she said stuck with me. Some time after Peter’s first birthday, when things around the house first fell into entropy, Melinda suggested we take dance lessons to help our relationship. I didn’t see the logic, but was too tired to argue. So twice a week before work, we’d drag ourselves down to the local studio and get instruction from a woman who was elated that she could educate a real-life Bio-Repo man in the art of graceful movement.

Melinda, for all her fine qualities, did not take well to dance. She was like a kid at a wedding, excited and gung-ho, but entertaining mostly on an
isn’t that adorable
level. She felt the music, certainly, and had an innate sense of rhythm and beat, but she was unable to master the footwork beyond a basic box step.

I, on the other hand, picked up on the moves like I’d been waiting to learn them all my life, as if there were an open box inside me and dancing was a gift that fit perfectly. The tango, the waltz, the mambo, it was all natural as breathing. If there was a one-two-shuffle-kick step, then I hit it with surgical precision. Spins, twists, turns, I nailed it all. Barely broke a sweat.

But when it came time to put the moves together, I was as useless as my wife. My individual motions were perfect, but the true concept of dance remained elusive.

“There is no sense of unity,” our instructor told me the last time I attended class, isolating my problem. “I see in you only the fragments. You can take the finest movements, the most beautiful snippets of motion, and perform them beautifully, but if there is no cohesion, then there is no dance.”

I never went back to class. Melinda told the instructor I’d come down with the flu, but I know she knew the truth. What was the point of practicing something that went against everything I understood?

Melinda blamed me for the failure of our marriage, and used the dance situation as an example of what had gone wrong. “You can’t put things together,” she yelled at me one autumn evening during dinner. Peter was playing in the living room. “Everything is pieces to you.”

I had twelve different arguments to refute her allegation, but in the heat of the moment, I was unable to form them into a single, logical defense. Rather than make her point for her, I stayed silent and ate my potatoes.

Carol’s therapist said it, too. “Our tests show you have a knack for deconstruction.”

I didn’t understand what he meant, so I nodded.

“Do you find this to be a problem?” he asked.

“Not if Carol doesn’t,” I said, deferring to my wife.

“Carol,” asked the shrink, “do
you
find it to be a problem?”

“Not really,” she sighed. “I just wish he wouldn’t be such a bastard.”

That’s four out of five wives who’ve used that term to refer to me, in case anyone’s counting. I wear it like a badge of honor.

Carol and I met when her brother-in-law’s restaurant burned to the ground. I’d stopped in for a quick bite between jobs, a liver extraction I’d just finished and another, very similar job, uptown. The joint was a new one on me, but I had no allegiance to one restaurant over another; as long as it stayed down, food was food.

Still, cleanliness is a matter of course with me, and I can’t abide poor health practices. I was halfway through my ravioli entree when I crunched down hard on some foreign object. Near to gagging, I plucked it from my mouth and discovered the jagged remnants of a woman’s fingernail. I threw down my napkin and pulled back from the table.

“Is there a problem, sir?” asked the waiter, scurrying to my side.

“The kitchen,” I said through clenched teeth. “Where is it?”

“If there’s a problem—”

I grabbed the young man’s thumb with my right hand, his wrist with my left, and made like I was playing jack-in-the-box. His face soured into a grimace as I twisted, his knees buckling. “The kitchen,” I repeated.

The chef was outraged at my presence in his workroom, but soon saw a light very similar to the waiter’s. He summoned the owner.

Chet was as apologetic as could be, and together we went on a search of the kitchen staff, inspecting the ladies’ hands for missing accessories. We worked our way through waitresses and bus girls and sous chefs before I saw the light go on behind Chet’s eyes—he had an idea. He led me into the back room of the restaurant, toward an office, where his sister-in-law was working on the books.

He said, “Lemme see your hands, Carol.”

She didn’t even ask who I was; didn’t seem to care. She sighed and held out her perfectly manicured hands, sans one index fingernail. I was relieved to see the entire set was acrylic; all I’d munched on was some hardened plastic.

It is no coincidence that I did the cooking around the house.

Years later, long after Carol had left me, Chet and I would remain pals, drinking ourselves into tales of nostalgia. He never liked Carol, he said. Just put up with her because his wife was her sister. Didn’t understand how I could screw someone that cold.

“She warms up,” I said.

“So does a block of ice,” said Chet. “And then whaddaya got?”

Carol had been sampling the ravioli in the kitchen when the nail fell off, and we were in the middle of extracting an apology from her when the screams started. It was commonplace clamor, at first, the chaos of a popular restaurant kitchen, which quickly turned into shouts of urgency. Chet, Carol, and I glanced at one another and ran for the door. I imagine they wanted to investigate the problem; I just wanted out.

But none of us was going anywhere. By the time we got to the kitchen, the grease fire that had started on the range had spread throughout the room, flames licking at the ceiling. I was barely able to shout out a “No!” before a busboy ran up with a tray full of water and launched it at the blaze. The flames spread and instantly flared up into a new conflagration, and through the building smoke, I could see the head chef knocking the bus boy around for his foolishness. Chet entered the fray, yelling orders this way and that, screaming for a fire hydrant, salt, anything.

My pack was still slung around my shoulder, and inside it, three canisters of heavily pressurized ether. These were not items I would wish to introduce to heat anytime soon. Grabbing Carol’s hand in mine, I dragged her backward, away from the kitchen, into the back office of the restaurant.

“What the hell are you doing?” she snapped, yanking her arm away.

I wanted to reply with something witty, or at least a movie-star grunt,
Saving your life, lady
. But all that came out was, “Shut up.” It didn’t work, but she followed me.

“You think you’re a hero?” she asked me as I led her through the corridors.

“Hell no,” I responded. I just wanted out.

“I’ve got books back there.”

“And they can burn. Is there a back door in this place?”

Carol shook her head. “It’s boarded up. Street bums kept sneaking in and stealing food from the kitchen.”

“Boarded I can deal with,” I said, and told her to lead me to it. On the way, she asked me what I did—“You a cop or something?”—and I flashed my neck tat in response. Rather than shy away like most folks, she came at me harder. Carol was the only one of my wives who didn’t have a problem with my career. She loved my job; she just didn’t love me.

We got out of the restaurant by using my pencil laser to bore away at the hinges of the emergency exit door; a well-placed kick sent the whole thing flying, and we were safe in the back alley. Rather than head our separate ways, we hung out by the trash cans until the fire trucks arrived, coughing out the smoke that had made its way into our lungs, Carol eager to hear about my life with the Union, me eager to impress the beautiful woman in the soot-stained sundress.

I took it slow with Carol. We didn’t marry for nine whole months.

Jake was the best man at each of my wedding ceremonies. He had one tuxedo that managed to fit him throughout all those years, his muscular body not changing a bit when everyone else’s metabolisms slowed like snails.

He was also a witness to each of my divorces, except for the last. The Union paid for him to get a notary certificate a few years back, and though he didn’t do much in the way of stamping and embossing, it did come in useful for certain Union loan claims. He was able to process three or four fewer documents per artiforg than the rest of us, a good hour’s worth of work, which gave him an advantage in securing new jobs. But he didn’t charge me a cent when it came to notarizing my divorce papers. That’s what good buddies do for each other. He’d even offered to be the official on record when Wendy and I got hitched, but she was intent on having a man of the cloth perform the ceremony. I told her that Jake had spent a few years in Catholic school, but she wouldn’t budge.

I wonder, if Jake finds us here—if he’s got us trapped and there’s nowhere to run—if that offer of officiating still stands. If he somehow tracks us down amid this garden of organs, I wonder if he will consent to marry Bonnie and me. It won’t be much I’ll ask for, just a simple ceremony, five minutes at the most, and then he can knock us out and repossess as much as he wants.

I should probably discuss the matter with Bonnie beforehand.

Carol had her own house, a beautiful Victorian down in Alabama, and for a while, I transferred to the Union offices down there, just to get a feel for the place. Union transportation was such that I could live practically anywhere and still make it back to the main offices every now and again in order to drop off artiforgs and pick up assignments, but I thought it would be best to get to know my fellow workers in the ’Bama office.