Repo Men (11 page)

But Tig shook his head, insistent on this last point: “I’m not helping you a whiff,” he said. “Before you got here, I was nothing to you. Once you leave, I’ll be nothing to you. But while you’re here, you’re my boy, and it’s my duty as your pop to tell you things you can’t possibly understand.” He paused for a moment, and added, “You understand?”

“No?” I tried.

Tig laughed and walked away. A few minutes later, I started throwing rocks again.

He was right about all of it. I never saw him after the war, and despite my fond feelings for him in retrospect, it wouldn’t be right to see him now. Tig was a military man in a military place, and that was how he lived; to bring him into any other situation would be like putting a snowman in Tijuana.

Second day in Italy, we were marched across the main field, into a low-slung building, and down three flights of stairs, descending the aluminum staircase in lockstep, the contraption vibrating roughly with the combined weight of forty-five men. Once we reached the bottom, they separated us into three seemingly random groups of fifteen, splitting us off single file and marching us down one of three hallways.

“Today,” Tig had told us that morning at breakfast, “you will each be tested to see how you can best assist us in the African campaign. You will be poked, you will be prodded, and you will be assessed. Some of you may even like it. At the end of the day, you will be assigned to a training facility here on the base, and that facility will become your home for the next eight weeks. You may not like your assignment. You may not agree with your assignment. You may not understand your assignment. But just like here in the mess hall, gentlemen, there will be no substitutions.”

As an assistant led us down a series of labyrinthine hallways and corridors, each exactly like the one that preceded it, I was thinking that the test would be to find our way back out into the real world; those who made it would get to go home, and those who didn’t would be sent to Africa. But after some time, we came to a pair of metal double doors set back into the wall, and a petite young female doctor awaiting our arrival. Strawberry blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, rimless glasses perched on a jellybean nose, smiling at us as we approached, just on the safe side of beautiful. I considered getting a number, making a play for her after Taps had run its course, but it turned out that once she was done with me, I was in no position to play the springtime courtier.

“We’ll take you one at a time,” she told my group. “The rest will wait out here.”

Numbers were assigned at random. Jake was sixth; I was last. We stood in the hallway, ramrod straight, eager to impress the chick every time she stuck her head out from between the doors and called the next soldier in. I thought of Beth; she hadn’t written in a month.

Meanwhile, muffled bangs filtered their way in through the walls, patterned, well-timed beats growing in intensity, as if a giant had made his way down the beanstalk and was slowly tromping toward town. But after a minute or two, just when it seemed that on the next
thump
we’d be able to figure out what the heck all the fuss was about, the noises would come to an end, the doctor would call another of us in, and the cycle would start all over again.

It wasn’t until Jake stepped through the double doors and I was left all alone in the hallway that I realized that none of the soldiers who walked inside that room had yet to come back out again.

If you look hard enough around the back alleys and hidden crannies of your workaday underworld, you’ll find plenty of places that operate under that Roach Motel principle: Folks go in, but they don’t come out. The Credit Union had one, in fact—the Pink Door, they called it, thanks to the Pepto-Bismol shade that some bright social psychologist had painted it back in the day when they still bothered to lull folks into a false sense of security.

The Pink Door was often used as a means of last resort with deadbeats who were public figures, clients you didn’t want to drag back into the world of solvency by their dangling entrails. So rather than call out the Bio-Repo men and leave a messy Beverly Hills scene for the paparazzi, they’d send an embossed invitation, delivered by courier from the Credit Union offices, a tactfully worded letter that requested the louse’s presence for a so-called arbitration meeting. Soon after, obituaries were released along with letters of credit reinstatement, and everyone went on with their merry lives.

Still, a Bio-Repo man usually was dispatched to accompany the creditor down to the offices, just in case things got messy. One time, I had the good fortune to escort Nicolette Huffington, software heiress and erstwhile actress, into the Los Angeles branch of the Union. Head held high, her gait confident and secure, she strolled past all the common riffraff begging for their lives and straight into the Pink Door waiting room. She was no longer the breathtaking beauty she had been back in her teenage years, and the ravages of time and excess plastic surgery had exacted their revenge upon her sagging flesh, but a Huffington was a Huffington—unpaid-for liver or no—and I couldn’t resist snagging a signature for Melinda, my wife at the time.

“Just a quick autograph,” I asked her, grabbing a pen from my pocket, flipping over the Credit Union invitation to use as a pad.

She huffed a little in that famous way of hers, eyeing me up and down. “Won’t this keep till afterward, darling?” she sighed, tossing her carefully coifed hair to one side.

“No,” I replied as I led her up to the ever-so-pink welcome mat, “I don’t think it will.”

Melinda showed that autograph to
everyone
.

The lady doctor asked me if I was seated comfortably, and I replied that under the circumstances, I certainly was. Surrounded by padded cushions, head resting on a thick pillow, body propped up into a frog crouch, legs flexed beneath my hips, elbows flared out to the side, everything strapped to a metal framework that kept me erect and balanced in this improbable position, I felt like I should be riding one of those old American motorcycles they outlawed years ago—knees splayed, back straight, arms spread wide to grip the handlebars—only there was no hog beneath me.

“What do I do?” I asked as she tightened the last of the belts.

“Nothing,” she replied. “Concentrate on the wall.”

“Where’d the other guys go?”

“The wall, please. Look at the wall.”

The doctor returned to her lab, a small cubicle separated from the main testing area by what looked to be six full inches of lead-lined glass. This see-through wall was so thick that the room beyond took on strange, curved proportions at the edges, twisting and bending in on itself, like looking through a teardrop.

“You’re not concentrating,” the doctor told me, her voice crackling over a speaker set into the headrest just behind my left ear. “I’m getting the data in here. Please, Private. The wall.”

So I decided to be a good little soldier and follow orders, but when I took a glance, the far wall wasn’t there anymore. Instead, an endless desert stretched out in front of me, spreading to the horizon in an expansive wash of beige. The rest of the testing area was still extant—I was keenly aware of the doctor in the other room, her eyes roving along my body, across the digital readouts that were giving away all my physical secrets—but it was as if that far wall had been knocked down by a team of expert demolitionists, neatly, quietly.

“There we go,” I heard her say, the voice at the edges of my consciousness. “Just like that.”

A flare in the distance, an explosion just over the horizon. The blue sky above lit up with a splash of orange, and a very distinct
ka-boom
—crisp, not muffled like the sounds from the hallway—echoed through the room. Intrigued, I leaned against my restraints, trying to get a better look at the desert before me.

Another flash of light, this one closer, and a second explosion following milliseconds later, the sound waves shoving through my body, tickling me from the inside. Before I could pinpoint exactly what was going on, there was another crash, this one to my right, and I was barely able to flick my eyes in that direction before the next wall of bass was upon me, rattling my limbs inside their confines, my bladder going weak from the force.

“Wait,” I tried to yell, but my voice was drowned out by the next wave of bombs—I was sure now this is what they were, that the enemy had somehow infiltrated our base camp, knocked down a portion of the training facility, and were coming back to finish the job. Lights flashed in rapid succession, popping off left and right, the shockwaves coming closer, stronger with every burst, my head compressing and expanding, a balloon in the hands of a child.

And that’s when I saw the final missile, the one headed home and locked on to target. It was beautiful, really, a thin pencil line of light arcing through the sky, the tail of fire growing larger as it sped toward me, and even if I hadn’t been strapped into six hundred pounds of metal framework, I might not have been able to move from the sheer magnitude of it all. Impending destruction, in its own way, has a kind of beauty that only small children and deer can appreciate.

I saw the light, but I did not hear the explosion. Not that time, I didn’t.

I
have been knocked unconscious on four occasions. The first we’ll come to presently; the second and fourth, I’m not ready to talk about yet. The third time was many years after I was discharged from the Marines, while I was still in training at the Credit Union. They’d hooked me up with one of the Level Threes, an old codger who’d joined up when it was all just Jarviks and some chain jobs, but he’d paid his dues, and as a result, he got a little assistance in the form of an apprentice. Only problem was, he wasn’t too keen on actually making the runs that were assigned to him, and as a result, I got a lot of single-handed on-the-job training, and fast.

One night, we’d been given the job of retrieving a set of kidneys from a deadbeat who owned a plumbing supply company down in the warehouse district. Easy enough job, fair pay, nothing good on TV that night to sap our interest. Standard commission, to be split 70 percent for the senior Bio-Repo man, 30 percent for me; I was fine with the division of the proceeds. I was between marriages that month, and it wasn’t hard to support myself on a steady diet of pasta and pretzels.

But when the time came to scootch our rumps down to the scene, my mentor gave out on me. Went to the movies, drank himself into a stupor, pulled a no-show. I could have waited until he was off the sauce, I suppose, petitioned the Union to push back the repossession appointment by a day or two, but back in those days the competition for jobs was fierce, and had I made any kind of fuss, odds were the case would have been reassigned. I knew the time would eventually come when I’d have to strike out on my own and make my bones, as it were, and this was as good as any. So I shut my trap and decided to go it alone.

The first step to any repo job is to map out the area. You’ve got to know where the client is, and you’ve got to know what else is nearby. How big is the house/office/hut in which he’s staying? Any other people inside? Are they on the phone? Are they armed? Are they on the phone with someone who is armed? That sort of thing.

I went through the motions. From the maps I’d obtained from a bribed county clerk, I figured the warehouse to be around 800 to 900 cubic meters, quite the sizable hideout. He was inside and alone; I could hear him fumbling around in there even without the aid of a powered listening device, but I knew it would be hard to pinpoint his location. For a moment I considered using alternate tactics to detain the client—I was in possession of a dart gun at the time, as well as a long-distance Taser—but those methods were less reliable and more dependent on my ability—or inability—to properly aim and fire. My first solo job, I decided, would have to be a smooth one. I broke out the ether.

Using my Union-issued pencil laser—a signing bonus they gave to new recruits, ours to keep even if we chose not to make a career in repossessions—I sliced open a small circle in a pane of glass just above the warehouse floor. A hose, a knob, a twist, and a flip. Three full canisters of ether slowly hissed their way into the structure, and I patiently sat there in the dark, pressing myself against the shadows, waiting for the drug to take effect. My training in dosage and doping was nearly as complete as any board-certified anesthesiologist, but you never find any country-club society matrons begging their daughters to marry the likes of me.

Fifteen-minute wait after the last canister had run its course, and then I decided it was time to go in and finish the job. I’d heard the telltale
thunk
of a falling body by the second tank of gas, so I knew the client was down for the count and prepped for the only surgery I knew how to perform. I had a gas mask on me, just in case the ether hadn’t yet completely evaporated, but I figured with a warehouse that size, there wasn’t any harm of overexposure.

I figured wrong. As soon as I stormed in the front door, I had only enough time to realize that the warehouse, while looking quite massive from the outside, had been segmented into a number of different offices on the inside, each of which was no more than 300 cubic meters. I tried to turn, I think, to realign my body in hopes of making a dash for the door, but the thick air, oversaturated in triplicate with great clouds of ether, shot up through my nose and hit my brain with a stunning one-two punch. My knees buckled; my shoulders sagged, and I fell hard on my knees as I sank to the floor. I had a bruise for two weeks.

I woke up that time to the enraged, puffy face of my mentor, his breath reeking of sour milk and rotten rum, screaming about how I’d almost let a client get away, and how he’d had to chase down the bum in the warehouse alley and pull out the guy’s kidneys with his bare hands.

In Italy, on the other hand, I woke up to a serene, porcelain vision of beauty leaning over me, her lab coat hanging open just a bit, the white cotton bra beneath barely visible against her skin, hand caressing my sweaty brow. She was waving a leather pouch beneath my nose that would have sent skunks reeling for cover, but all I could smell was the soft perfume caressing her neck.

“Take it easy,” she said as I tried to sit up. I was in a cot of some sort, no longer strapped down. Harold Hennenson was on the bed next to me, and the other soldiers from my platoon were milling about the room, shaking their heads, blinking their eyes, each in his own separate, special state of confusion. Only Jake was on top of his game, already laughing it up with the nurses and making fun of the rest of us.

“Did we get bombed?” I asked the doctor.

“No one was bombed. Lie back down.”

“That was the exam?”

“That was the exam.”

Harold sat up then, squirming onto the edge of his bed, leaning over toward mine. “Concussion test,” he said plainly. I could see his eyes floating around in their sockets, fluttering this way and that. “Wanted to see if we could take a hit.”

“You pass out, too?” I asked.

Harold nodded, dropped his head. Ashamed, perhaps. “Yeah,” he said, “I didn’t take it too well.”

“Maybe if they’d have hit you in the stomach…” I suggested.

This perked him up a little, and we spent the next twenty minutes drinking juice and clearing our heads, until we, too, were given clearance to pace the room in a half stupor, struggling to remain upright and dignified.

They gave us other tests, of course—vision tests, hearing tests, memory tests, reflex tests, tests of our sense of smell and our sense of taste, tests that seemed to go on forever, and tests that took no more than fifteen seconds. At the end of each, we were given a sheet of paper with a series of numbers on it, digits that were incomprehensible to us but caused our superiors to ooh and aah to no end.

A week later, we were ordered to line up and accept our new assignments, the posts at which we would train before heading out to Africa. Harold was two men down from me; Jake was a row back.

Sergeant Ignakowski ran through the names and assignments rapid fire. “Burns, Engineering. Carlton, Infantry. Dubrow, Infantry…”

As for me, Jake, and Harold, we got to drive a tank.

Six months later, I finally got up the nerve to ask Tig why I was placed on tank duty as opposed to some less colorful and more relaxation-intensive job. We were sitting inside a makeshift tent in the middle of the African desert, waiting for the orders that would send us back out into the field. We drank water from small foil pouches that never seemed to go dry, and recently I’d been sucking down as much moisture as possible, trying to reconstitute myself after fifteen days in the 110 degree heat. The fighting machines used by the Marines in those days might have been fierce, but they were not well air-conditioned.

“You got tanks because that’s what the brass decided,” Sarge told me. He’d just come back from HQ, and was still done up in his dress whites, the pits and back shining through with perspiration, dripping to the floor in a Niagara of sweat.

“From those tests?”

“Some of ’em.”

“Which ones?”

Sarge didn’t even try to fudge the answer. He always let you know the truth, and didn’t care much of what the response would be. “Remember the concussion blast?” he said. I nodded. “That was the one. You, Freivald, Hennenson, scored in the top range, so they put you in tanks.”

I still didn’t quite understand. “So we…we didn’t get concussions?”

“No,” said Tig. “You all got concussions, pretty damn bad. But you came out of it sooner’n the rest of ’em, got control of your bodies. Guess you boys have bigger skulls than the others, so the pressure came off faster. That, or you’ve got smaller brains. Either way, tanks is tanks. Time to ship back out.”

Bigger skulls and smaller brains. This was the kind of military precision with which we won the war in Africa.

I slept just now. Thirty minutes, maybe more. I hope it’s more a sign that my body is adapting to the circumstances, and less a sign that I’m becoming complacent, that somewhere in my mind I’ve decided that rest is more important than vigilance.

My lack of restlessness may also be due to that note I found in my typewriter yesterday. The more I try not to think about it, the more I’m drawn back:

Shut up
.

So curt. So final. I can’t help but wonder who wrote it, and where they might be. And why they might be. The Tyler Street Hotel might be a great place to hide out, but it’s my place to hide out; if there are other residents, I’d like to make their acquaintance. I may consider charging rent.

I have heard sounds at night, come to think of it. A bang or two from one of the lower floors, a creaking strut here or there. But these are the noises that come with any burned-out twentieth-century hotel, and although my stomach bottoms out with every thump and click, although my hands leap for their scalpels at every creak, I never before considered the possibility that these sounds could eventually bring me comfort. But I have been alone for months, and though isolation is very much the common thread that runs through any Bio-Repo man’s life, it’s one I’m always keen to cut.

I don’t have any delusions about my ability to stay sane on my own: I’m a five-time winner, nuptially speaking, and there’s got to be a reason for my inability to stay single for any protracted length of time.

Second trip to the psychiatrist with Carol, and the same shrink who told me I had a great capacity for love proceeded to tell me that I had a number of unresolved fears.

“You know what I do for a living, right?” I asked.

He nodded. Knew full well. “But that doesn’t preclude the very real notion that you’ve got a lot of deep-set fear.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Death.”

“Who doesn’t? What else?”

“Failure.”

“And you don’t?”

“Loneliness,” he said with a sly wink toward my wife.

I shook it off. “You know how many people there are in this world, Doc? Eight billion of us on this planet. A two-toed leper can’t even find himself an isolated space without another six lepers coming by to say howdy. I can’t be scared of loneliness—there’s no such thing anymore.”

That’s not entirely true, I know now. Ninth year as a full Repo man, and I had just taken on a case to run out a Ghost system from James “T-Bone” Bonasera, a one-time music producer out in the suburbs. This guy had engineered some of my favorite songs back in the day, tunes me and the boys piped through the tank intercom system when the battle signs were down—this was the fellow who produced the Sammy Brand Trio’s recording of “Baby in My Sleeve,” of all things—and despite my reluctance to get involved with Ghost work, I felt like I owed it to the guy to tell him how much I appreciated his music before I ripped out his central nervous system.

I don’t enjoy Ghost work. I’m not technically licensed for it, in fact, though every Bio-Repo man has done his fair share, authorization or not. I can understand a man needing a better pancreas or a spanking-new set of aluminum lungs, but when it comes to replacing and augmenting something as abstract as sense and memory, I tend to bow out and let the spooks do their job. Don’t get me wrong—some of my best friends do a little pimping for the Ghost. But you’ve got to have a certain amount of empathy to get it done right, and that’s where I come up short.

But the money was fantastic, the opportunity to meet a personal champion too great to pass up, and so I headed out to the suburbs. The back alleys and mangy street dogs soon gave way to paved sidewalks and scampering children, and the smells took on a decided twist of pine and oak. The leaves had just begun to change, and though we had reds and yellows in the city, they seemed so much more
proper
out there, in the same way a bottle of red wine tastes better in Venice, Italy, than it does in Venice, California.

The home was a mansion, 20,000 square feet, easy, but I was glad for its size. Any smaller, and I’d have been tempted to gas it out first, thus losing my opportunity to speak with the man. As it was, I’d never have enough ether to fill a house that size in any prudent amount of time, so I’d have to resort to more personal measures.

Gates, a half-mile driveway, topiary bushes gone to seed. T-Bone was still living in the mansion, I’d been told, but the IRS had turned the full power of their spotlight on his financial records and come up with more than a few question marks. As a result, they had attached his residuals from the last ten albums, and then added in the proceeds from the next ten as well, just to be on the safe side. The bankruptcy auction was set for a week from that Wednesday. House, furnishings, cars—he was broke beyond broke, and they were taking it all back. Unfortunately for him, so were we.

I found him down in the music studio he’d built in the east wing of the house, headphones wrapped around his ears, eyes closed, grooving intently to whatever was playing over the forty-track system. I stood there for a good ten minutes, watching him as he fiddled with the mixing board, fine-tuning whatever this newest piece might be.

Eventually, T-Bone sat upright and removed his headphones, placing them carefully atop the board. Without turning around, he said, “Good evening.” His voice was low, gravelly, as if he needed to replace his own woofers. “You’re from the IRS?”