Repo Men (2 page)

A
ll proper jobs—at least, every job I’ve ever had—begin and end with a full accounting of the materials at hand. Though my current daily activities amount to little more than huddling in the corner of this abandoned hotel and peeking furtively out the boarded-up windows every two minutes, I figure I might as well keep to the routine. It’s sustained me so far.

My possessions:

One typewriter: an Underwood. Pale blue paint scraped down to the metal, worn from years of neglect and disuse. Found in the rear office of the hotel lobby, atop a file cabinet sporting a rats’ nest made from decades-old newspapers. The ink strip is fading but otherwise in working order, which is more than I can say for the keyboard itself. The shift key is missing, and every time I hit it, the rough shaft of exposed metal spears my finger. Any run-on sentences are unlikely to be accidental; I’m simply wary of capitalization.

Alternately, the typewriter could be drawing blood on purpose. An autonomic machine, testing for my type, preparing for the inevitable surgery to come. For all I know, it’s been stashed here by the Credit Union people as a sick joke. It’s the kind of thing they’d do. It’s the kind of thing I might have done. Perhaps there’s a camera inside. A homing beacon.

The typewriter clacks, that’s for sure, which is enough of a homing beacon in and of itself. Makes an awful racket,
rat-a-tat-tat
-ting away like a failing machine gun. What I wouldn’t give for the soft strokes of a keyboard and the glow from a plasma screen to brighten my lonely nights.
Clack-clack
,
clack-clack
. It’s sure to give me away, but I’m feeling saucy just now. How long this outlook will last, I can’t say. It’s not exactly up to me.

These sounds, these pages, are my sacrifice. For three months I’ve been holding down my breath, suppressing my sneezes, inhaling every cough. I move only at night, only in short, shuffling steps. This is what you do when you’re hiding. The floorboards creak. Noise is a no-no, an amateur slipup. All noises. Any noises.
Call up the Appropriate Government Officials
, these noises say.
There’s a man hiding out in the abandoned hotel on Fourth and Tyler
, these noises say. Can’t have that, no sir. The last thing I need is to have to change apartments again. What with the housing crunch, it’s getting tough to find abandoned buildings that adequately suit my elevated tastes.

This will be my typing regimen: One hour on, two hours off. This gives me a one-third chance of being detected, but I’m confident that anyone who truly cares to find me will do so without the help of the old Underwood here. They have radar, infrared, scanners beyond compare. Perhaps, if I’m lucky, those gadgets will be their undoing. No one thinks lo-tech anymore.

Let’s keep going.

Paper: Half of a rodent-chewed ream of three-hole punch, found near aforementioned filing cabinet. Gum wrappers, tossed in a pile beneath the desk. Bottles of cleaning solution, long since emptied, but the labels are easy enough to peel off and feed into the cylinder of my trusty Underwood. The varying length of pages may pose a problem, but I’ll attempt to fit my words to the medium at hand. I am nothing if not flexible.

Body: Eyes locked and loaded, full wide open. At night I have learned to sleep as the sharks in the ocean, lids propped up and attached to the top of my forehead with pilfered Scotch tape. I am ever-vigilant, the ultimate watchdog, protector of my domain, and I owe it all to the 3M Company.

Ears straining at every silent moment, so finely tuned they can pick up the cry of a dormouse amid the tide of midmorning traffic. Nostrils in a permanent state of flare, sucking up the available air, inspecting it for the slightest whiff of ether, and expelling it out again unscathed. Clean. Nothing. So far.

I need to reload my shotgun.

Weaponry, orthodox or otherwise:

A pitiful stash, I know, but it’ll have to do me. Self-defense is an expensive proposition, and my pension ran out two months ago. Even if it hadn’t, I’m sure the Credit Union has staked out my P.O. box by now—retrieving my monthly check would surely become one of my final acts, and my life, even at this stage, is worth a little more than six hundred bucks.

When I worked for the Union, I was one of the top-ranked Bio-Repo guys around. Level Five, and this is not idle bragging. This is fact. I made the jump in rank from Level Two to Level Four in just under two years, alongside my best friend and colleague Jake Freivald. It wasn’t like there was a competition—not an official one, anyway—but Jake and I kept a close eye on each others’ progress and made sure we locked our steps all the way to the top. I made Level Five two months before he did. Was I better at my job? Slightly more focused? Even a bit more talented? Let’s sure as hell hope so. My life depends on it.

Everyone’s got their favorite organs; it’s the nature of the gig. Sure, you took the pink sheets that came across your desk and worked the clients that were given to you—job’s a job, after all—but the liver was my specialty, specifically the Kenton and Taihitsu models, and I admit I took a singular delight in repossessing from the chronically inebriated. Let’s face it: Anyone who keeps knocking back the booze even after they’ve been fitted with an artiforg doesn’t deserve a whole lot of dignity in death.

One guy was so drunk when I broke into his place at three in the morning, I didn’t need to waste a milliliter of gas. He lay there, squirming around, legs kicking slightly, twisting his fleshy body in a slow horizontal mambo—nothing I couldn’t handle—and didn’t leak a peep when I started in on my business. “You havin’ fun?” I asked him halfway through. My scalpel was buried deep within his viscera. The flow of blood onto the hardwood floor was steady, but lighter than I’d expected.

“Ohhhyyyaaaaaa.”

“You ain’t gonna be drinking much anymore, are you, buddy?”

“Ohhheee hee hee hee.”

“Keep laughing,” I told him. The sensor beacon blinked away behind a tangle of tissue, and I hacked for it like an adventurer scything his way through the jungle underbrush. “You just keep laughing.”

The bloated bastard lasted a few minutes after I had his KL–418 in my hot little hands, and damned if he didn’t giggle his way to the great beyond. Thank you, Jack Daniels, you saved me a pint of ether.

I’d rather do a liver job than any other organ, though I had many good nights running out that splenetic system from Marshodyne. The latest model—the one they’ve been displaying at trade shows for a year now—supposedly comes with a built-in detaching system that actually cuts the spleen off from the host body as soon as the nonpayment sixty-day grace period is up. Jesus H. Sure, it eases up the hack work on the repo job, but it makes you wonder when the day will come when we Bio-Repo men aren’t needed anymore, when the organs will find a way to extract themselves from the deadbeats, squirm out of their host bodies, and waddle on down to the nearest supply house by themselves. I’ll be long gone by then. Probably for the best.

Thing is, the liver’s a beaut, easiest extraction in the body. Very little in the way, a clean path with remarkably little adjoining tissue. Everything else comes with problems. Jarviks are buried beneath all that bone and muscle mass, and the commission isn’t worth the grunt work and ether release. ’Course, back in the good ol’ days, I’d take any Jarvik job you could throw at me if the payoff was high enough, which is how I landed myself in this pretty mess in the first place.

Neuro-nets are—well, don’t get me started on neuro-nets. I don’t do ’em anymore, not if I can help it. I can’t extract what I can’t see, and no Ghost’s gonna tell me different. Yeah, I took the required courses during repo training, but didn’t fork over a lot of my attention. Ghost work may have the aura of respectability, and everybody’s always up for a good story about your latest Ghost trip down some poor sap’s brainstem, which makes it a lot more likely that you’ll get invited to dinner parties. But livers…livers are real, solid, tangible. I can see them, I can yank them, I can hold them. I’ve got more important things to worry about than “phantom nerves” and “virtual sensory pathways.”

Eyes and ears have too many bits and bytes and chips and things, and though I’m all for micro-extractions, I gotta admit to having been something of a slacker when it came to studying up on my nanoparts. Let’s see, what’s left…? Thyroids are ugly, stomachs are messy, bladders are puny, kidneys are child’s play. Slice down the back, a grab, a pull, and knock off for the night with a bottle of vodka for your pillow.

Basic limb prostheses are hack work, a real bore. No real nitty and only a margin of gritty. Hands, arms, fingers, legs, yawn yawn yawn. In the industry, we call ’em chain jobs. Short for chainsaw. Thing is, most of the extraction is done out-body, so you don’t even need a full repo license to work the limbs. I used to send my nephew for limb work—he’s fifteen, but the kid’s got to learn a trade somewhere, and he’s not the type for higher education. Hell, he’s not the type for lower education, either, but he’s a good little pisser and I thought it might be nice to make the repo trade sort of a family business. I couldn’t ask my son to join up. Even if I knew where he was, I couldn’t ask my son. He’d spit in my face, and I’d deserve it.

I haven’t seen him in six years. Peter, I mean. My son. The last time I saw him, we were at a Snack Shack on the west side of the city, standing near a line of customers waiting to buy potato chips and beer, and he was beating away at my chest with his frail fists. Gotta admit, it didn’t hurt, not physically, but I made a show of crying out in pain. For effect. Peter was always daunted by my physicality—dry weight I’m a good 95 kilos, nearly all muscle, whereas he’s more like his mother—delicate bones, radiant features. He’s a porcelain doll and I’m the gorilla running amok in the store. Peter looks an aristocrat in a time when aristocracy is crumbling under the weight of its own excesses. That’s Peter, I tell everyone, that’s my boy—beautiful and lonely and hopelessly out of his time.

Peter is my only son. He’s my only child at all, the offspring of my third wife, Melinda, though for the most part he grew up around my fourth and fifth wives, Carol and Wendy, who were warm enough and kind enough to treat him as if he were their own. Good kid. Don’t know how it happened, but he turned out to be a good kid. Melinda was gone from my life by Peter’s second birthday, and I’ve only seen her once since then. Once was enough, for any of us.

We shared joint custody, that’s true, but arranged the weekly transfer of our son through wholly impersonal means. Phone texts did the trick nicely for the first few years—I’d jot off a little note telling Melinda where she could pick Peter up at the end of the day, and she’d reciprocate. We’d leave the boy with friends, co-workers, anyone who’d take on the responsibility of temporary guardian and way station before one parent or the other could retrieve him.

This wasn’t my fault. At least, not at first. I would have been more than happy for Melinda to come into my home, to sit down, have some coffee, talk about our week, but Melinda wanted nothing to do with me. She preferred to have our son passed around from contact to contact as if he were a piece of microfilm in a cold war spy movie than have to converse with her ex-husband.

When Melinda filed for divorce, she wrote down only two words as her reason for seeking a dissolution of our two-year marriage:
Incontrovertibly self-absorbed
. Or is that three words? No matter. The question I have is: Did she mean me or her?

Here are the reasons given by my wives for each of my five divorces:

Wendy was the only tactful one among them. She could have written down any reason she chose and I wouldn’t have complained, because the truth is that I left her while our marriage was strong and steady, the greatest relationship I’d ever been in. Wendy could have taken me for everything I had left (not much), but she chose to dissolve our marriage in a no-fault state, placing the burden of blame on neither—or both—of us.

The rest of it is either lie or exaggerated truth, especially that bit about sexual non-performance. Now, there was a time…well, let’s us say that there was a point in my life when the old badger wouldn’t rise up out of his hole so quick, but
non-performance
is a strong word. And I never once cheated on Carol. I never once cheated on any of my wives. Carol needed a reason to divorce me from within her home state of Alabama, and adultery must have been the first thing to pop into her mind. She was always impulsive like that.