Repo Men (21 page)

I’d been to housing projects all around the country, of course; as a Bio-Repo man, you live practically every working day in some diseased pit or another. But Reagan Heights was one of the worst, vermin-speaking, that I’d seen in a long time. It was like the rats rented the place, only they had a bad human infestation. I double-parked my car in what was essentially an automobile graveyard, ancient rusted domestics from forty years ago left to rot away into three-wheeled heaven.

The Federal HUD had long since been disbanded, of course, and the state-funded departments that sprang up in its place never quite got on the ball in terms of bringing functional aesthetics to the ghetto. I walked past towering high-rises competing for space with small, low-slung duplexes and blocking out their light, depriving the whole ugly mess of any sense of coherency. Pinks and greens and yellows, all faded, all chipping, fought with the browns of the untended, out-of-control lawns, and the building names and street numbers had all but fallen off of the stucco, making identification difficult, if not impossible.

But I knew where I was going. I’d followed the guy home from the porn shop.

Couldn’t gas down the place, because his duplex was connected to others via a common air shaft, and I’d heard the high-pitched clatter of children nearby. The last thing a new company like BreatheIt needed was to gas a couple of kids onto the evening news. I picked the lock, slipped in the front door, and found the deadbeat in an easy chair, preparing to pleasure himself.

I waited in the shadows, watching as he placed the nudie mag on the rickety end table, unbuttoned his filthy jeans, and pulled them down to his ankles. Immobility.

“Breathing okay?” I asked as I stepped into the light. The client fell hard into the chair, shoulders shaking. I lunged out with a flashlight, shining it into his eyes, forcing him to scrunch up his face. Pantsless, shaking, squinting—this could not have been his finest moment.

“I—I’ll call the cops—” he stuttered, making feeble attempts to reach a phone halfway across the room. I pulled out a Luger I was fond of at the time, complete with a long-barreled silencer, and shot the phone three times before it fell to the floor, smoking.

“You’ve got some property that doesn’t belong to you anymore,” I explained, calmly removing the paperwork from the inside pocket of my leather jacket, “and I’m here to take it back.” As long as there was no ether involved, it was always easier if you could get the clients to sign off on their own repossessions—less red tape back at the office—but it was a rare occurrence.

Now, either this guy was on narcotics or I wasn’t looking as fierce as usual that night, because the son of a bitch actually tried to fight me off. As I approached the trembling man, yellow receipt and pen in one hand, Luger in the other, he leaned back in the chair and kicked out with his naked legs, landing a solid shot to my midsection. I doubled over.

It only took a second to recover, but by then he’d managed to waddle out of the easy chair and hop for the far bedroom. Reaching down to my boot, I lashed out with the Taser, the darts soaring across the room and slamming into the door frame just as he leaped through. Sighing, I calmly strolled to the door, reloaded the Taser gun with two fresh darts, and entered the bedroom.

And there he was, sitting on the floor, still in his skivvies, cracking open jar after jar of loose change. It was a swimming pool of nickels and dimes, cascading around his legs in tinkling waterfalls. “I got—I got the money,” he stammered. “It’s all here, right here.”

“I’m not counting that.”

“I’ll count it,” he whined.

“And I’m not trusting you.” My first move was for the Taser, but a niggling thought soon stopped me. I didn’t quite remember BreatheIt’s policy on late payments. Kenton, for example, would rather the Bio-Repo man take the money, if in full, than repo the organ. I didn’t want to botch my first job for this new supply house, and I didn’t want to call the office and profess my ignorance on the matter. So I played it safe.

An hour later, and we were at a local bank. I’d stolen some pillowcases from some of Reagan Heights’ more absent tenants and made the guy fill them with his change. Sixteen pillowcases, all told, and I held him at gunpoint while he dragged the change up to the bank’s bulletproof window. The teller wasn’t too keen on counting change that hadn’t already been rolled, but I had a nice discussion with the bank manager, and after dispensing a few free artiforg credits, all was settled. We were given a helpful V.P. to assist us in a back room.

According to the receipt, the deadbeat’s bill, with late payment penalties and all, came to just over sixteen thousand dollars. The kicker is, he almost made it.

“Fifteen thousand, eight hundred and twelve,” said the kind woman with the bouffant hairdo. “And forty-five cents.”

The client was thrilled. His face, previously blanched of color, returned to a normal hue, and I thought for a moment he was going to hug me. “Take it,” he said, pushing the mounds of change toward me. “Take it all, and I promise to pay every month.”

“You’re two hundred short,” I pointed out. “That’s not payment in full.”

He started screaming then, shrieking like an alarm siren, begging the bank teller to help him, but she wisely scooted out of the room as I brought the Taser to full power. The bank employees were good enough to stay out of my way during the fifteen-minute extraction, and as I shuffled out of the bank with both BreatheIt lungs still pumping away beneath my arms, they told me not to worry about the mess, that they’d clean up.

I could have loaned him the two hundred bucks, I guess, but I had a feeling that the guy wouldn’t be good for it.

Sometimes, despite my best efforts, I allow trust to jump the fence and play for my team. Trusted my wives; that worked out swell. Trusted my staff sergeant; good sense there. Trusted my boss and my friends at the Union; jury’s still out on that one.

“You want to know how I got here,” Bonnie said to me once we were on the subway. It wasn’t a question, and she was correct.

“Tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

We kissed on it. Our first. A light peck, lip to lip, the electric hum of her tongue stopping just short of mine. We were the only folks on this side of the train—number one and number twelve on the Union’s Hundred Most Wanted List, a fortune in flesh and metal waiting for any smart snitch to get a glimpse—yet we were somehow able to relax enough to stretch out across the seats, lean back, and tell our tales.

Bonnie went first:

She had been a housewife, plain and simple, the loving spouse of a Union-registered surgeon, an internist who specialized in quick, nearly painless pancreas and kidney implantations. They had a lovely home in the hills and a winter cabin in Park City that wasn’t too big, wasn’t too small, but was perfect for short ski trips with friends. She and her husband owned three imported automobiles, one domestic convertible muscle car to tool around in on the weekends, and a small sailboat they kept in a rented slip up in Vero Beach. They had no children of their own, but showered their love and affection on their nieces and nephews, planning elaborate birthday parties and holiday trips, purchasing toys and clothes and games for them, waiting for the day when the little red line on the early-pregnancy detector would finally turn into a plus sign, and Bonnie could give birth to the child of their dreams. The obstetrician said it would come any day now, as long as they held a positive attitude and kept trying. “Have a lot of sex,” he told them. And they followed doctor’s orders.

Two years passed, then three, and though they’d had enough sex to make it a chore, there was nothing. That’s when the tests began, long complicated procedures involving tubes and blood and needles. “I was a baked potato,” Bonnie said to me on that subway train. “They kept poking me to see if I was done.”

One afternoon during the third year, as Bonnie was doing her weekly shopping in the local grocery store, she felt something warm and wet running down her leg. Her first thoughts went to blood, mucus, any of the signs of miscarriage she’d come across so many times these last few years. But as she looked down at her pants, she realized in horror that it was urine, and that she had no way of stopping the flow.

That’s when the tests really intensified, and that’s when they found the growth. The cancer had begun not in Bonnie’s bladder, but in her uterus, and the only way to stop the spread, they told her, was to remove the uterus and bladder at once, replacing them with top-of-the-line artiforgs from Kenton. Her husband, a wealthy man with an excellent credit history who loved his wife very much, quickly convinced her that this could be the only sane, rational course of action.

“They opened me up,” Bonnie said. “And they put ’em in. They said the artificial uterus was better than the real thing, that it had special womb-forming gen-assists built into the lining, that I’d be pregnant before I turned around, but I knew that wouldn’t be the end of it.”

And it wasn’t. The cancer spread.

By the time she went back for a checkup, malignant cells had taken over her ovaries, destroying the eggs along with their nest. Emergency oophorectomy.
Now
they had that cancer beat, they told her, and even though Bonnie’s eggs were gone, the scientists assured her that they could find a way to combine some of her DNA with her husband’s sperm, and as long as they found a suitable egg donor, the two of them could still be natural parents.

Until her stomach went, too. And her liver, and her pancreas. And her spleen and her kidneys and…

They’d never seen anything like it, they said; the cancer moved in a blitzkrieg, storming each part of her body, seemingly taking it without a fight. Her organs were France, and the cancer ravaged the countryside of her body.

But the faster the disease spread, the faster her husband ordered new artiforgs, securing loan after loan after loan for his dear, dying wife. Two more years passed in this way, her days filled with trips to the hospital and supply houses, her natural organs replaced one by one with perfectly designed replicas, as good as or better than the originals.

By the time they were all done, by the time the cancer truly had been excised from her body, Bonnie was 74-percent artificial.

“My skin is my own,” she told me, “and a lot of the fatty tissues, lucky me. I got to keep one breast, and for the other they implanted a Quattrofil, inflated to look exactly like the real one, only it’s got a refillable milk pouch to help me breast-feed more naturally. Ha. A lot of my bones are natural, but they said that as I got older and osteoporosis took over, I’d need to have those replaced, too, or the titanium support beams that make up the rest of my body might overwhelm my whole frame. The skull is mine, though most of the sensory sections of my brain are shot through with Ghost wires, and around half of my tactile experiences are stored in a suspension gel accessed by a solid-state processor. Sometimes, when I’m thinking really hard, I can hear my memories squishing around for space. The infrastructure is all there, but it needed a lot of reinforcement.

“Basically,” she said, “I was retrofitted back to life.”

But here’s the best part:

“And your organs…” I asked, “the big ones…?”

“All artiforgs—with one exception. The cancer raced through my body, hitting everything it could, but for some reason it left my heart alone. Every time they opened me up, they expected to have to fit me with a Jarvik, but the cells in there stayed pure. Still, the doctors wanted to set me up with one, figuring if the rest of my body could live to a hundred and fifty, why not my heart, but I refused. If it hadn’t been touched by the cancer, then I didn’t want it out. The doctors were reluctant, but they couldn’t go against my wishes. My husband tried to talk me into it—what’s another artiforg in a body filled with them, right? But I can be bull-moose stubborn when I want, and the discussion was over before it started. So that’s where I am today—real heart, fake container.”

I laughed then, loud and clear, my first good laugh in months. It started low, in my belly, and exploded up through my mouth, startling Bonnie and drawing the attention of the few other passengers who’d boarded the train. But I didn’t care—I laughed and laughed until my sides ached, unable to explain to Bonnie why it was all so damned funny.

I had an artificial heart. She had an artificial everything else. No wonder we connected from the start. Me and her, we were the perfect jigsaw puzzle.

F
or the first two months after I returned from Africa, I sat around the house a lot. Stayed in bed for hours, curled up in a control-chair crouch, fiddling with crossword puzzles, reading the funny papers, worrying Mother to no end. She’d come down and try to get me to dress, shower, look for a job, but I wasn’t interested. I told her it was because I was trying to sort the war out in my head, trying to figure out how the experience had affected me. This, naturally, was a lie. I was a lazy bum.

Checked out some mech jobs over at the local chop-shop, but the work was too upfront, too humdrum. They wanted me to work with engines, recalibrating parts no bigger than my fingernail; my only experience with machines was on a macroscopic scale. Treads, gun turrets, ten tons of metal streaming down the desert sand. Mech jobs were literally too small for me.

The higher-tech firms weren’t interested in my services, either, and I couldn’t blame them. With the exception of some warehouse duties in high school, tank driving was the only real job on my stunted resume, and it didn’t get me very far with the business set. Not that I wanted in on that life. Or on any life. Hell, I didn’t know what I wanted.

Until the day I caught up with Jake Freivald. He’d served a few extra moths, finishing up his recon assignments, clearing out whatever messes they’d begun now that the war was over, and I hadn’t spoken to him in all that time. It wasn’t until I hit a local bar—alone, depressed, and looking for companionship of nearly any sort—that I had any idea he was even back in town.

I walked into the tavern, sat at the bar, and the first thing I heard apart from the jukebox was, “You little sack of shit.” Behind my back, aimed at me. I prepared for a fight. Wasn’t particularly in the mood to throw down, but was grateful that at least I’d be doing something productive with my time. “You goddamned ugly piss-poor moth-eaten mother-crappin’ sonofoabitch.”

I turned, hands already balled into loose fists, but it was Jake, just Jake, laughing it up with some cute redhead on his arm, but soon enough he’d lost the girl and sat down next to his oldest friend. We drank, and then we drank some more, and we caught each other up on what we’d been doing for the past few months. My story was bland as toast, the days of boredom blending into one another. Jake had gotten in some action during the final cleanup phase of the operation, but since he’d rotated back to the States, it had all become something of a drag.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong,” he said after the fourth or fifth beer, “I can get down with the military pension and all that. A grand a month for sitting on my ass won’t get a complaint outta me.”

“Hell, no.”

“Hell, no, indeed.” Jake finished off his beer and ordered another. “But it’s not like I’ve got any hobbies.”

“Any legal ones,” I offered.

“And you’re bored fucking stiff, I can tell that just from looking at you. Probably shit your pants with glee if someone burst in here right now with a machine gun.”

I couldn’t argue with him there. “So?”

“So…nothing. You sit, I sit, we find some goddamned desk job and go about living the lives we’re supposed to live, I guess.” He couldn’t have sounded more depressed about the concept.

“I can’t see you running with the shirt-and-tie crowd,” I said.

“Over them, maybe.” Jake smirked. “In a tank.”

He held out his thumb, and I pressed mine against it. At that moment, it was us against the world, two lost soldiers in search of a war they’d never find again.

“I miss the rush,” Jake softly admitted.

“I miss the structure,” I said.

Jake finished off the last of his beer and, for good measure, took a swig off mine, as well. “I miss the kill.”

They always put the come-on ads in bathrooms; I imagine it’s because they’re trying to take advantage of the inebriated or the incontinent or both, but the Union marketing people have their shit together and I can’t argue with it.

Even back then, when the ads were just ink on paper tacked to a wall, they knew how to tweak the right people at the right time. Jake and I had no idea when we walked into that crapper that the next phase of our lives had already begun.

There we were, six or seven sheets to the wind, barely standing up as we pissed into adjacent urinals, trying our damnedest to coax our bladders into action, when our eyes fell on the poster on the wall in front of us:

L
EARN A
T
RADE
. J
OIN THE
U
NION
. F
ULFILL
Y
OUR
D
ESTINY.

It was destiny. Said so right on the poster. Who were we to argue with Fate?

There was no Mall back then; the Union and the supply houses were individual operations, each content to scratch out their own little corner of the slowly burgeoning artiforg market. Arnold Kurtzman had yet to open up his storefront, and the business, while quite legal, was still looked upon as shady by doctors who had been raised in a world where medical ethics hadn’t yet caught up with technology. That which seemed morally questionable became, by default, morally reprehensible, no trial, no jury.

The Credit Union headquarters was located in what would have then been considered a bad part of town, but has today been re-gentrified into a sparkling example of urban “recommitment.” In other words, it’s stocked with big box stores, chain restaurants, and the families with babies who cry in them.

Back then, it was all auto mechanics, liquor stores, and pawn shops, but no one really bothered anyone else, and if you didn’t mind a little dog shit on the streets, it was fine for walking at all but the darkest hours.

Jake and I headed up to the Union building, a large warehouse abutted by two empty lots. A bunch of guys stood on the stoop, smoking cigarettes; some I recognized as guys from the neighborhood, some I didn’t, but all had the same air of practiced boredom that I had been cultivating since I got back from Africa. Finally, I felt at home.

Jake recognized a guy who’d lived down the block from him a few years back, and he introduced the guy as Big Dan. He was at least half a head and sixty pounds bigger than me, so it’s not like the name was particularly ironic. On the side of his neck was a jumble of scar tissue with a colorful play of shimmering lights washing over it. It was the first time I’d seen a Union tattoo up close, and I was transfixed.

“The rest of these knobs are waiting for their number,” Big Dan explained as he led us past the line of young men. “I’m gonna take you in personally.”

Turns out Big Dan had stumbled onto the Credit Union three weeks before we did, and was already a member of their training program; as such, he was able to wheel us in past the security guards and straight up to his boss’s office, where he demanded that we be given jobs.

“Do they have any special skills?” asked the supervisor, a man who would die four years later in an airplane crash when the pilot’s Ghost system malfunctioned during landing.

“We drove tanks in the war,” Jake explained, not letting me get a word in. “And I did some recon work…which I can’t tell you about, but let’s just say we’re qualified. So shut up with the questions and give us a job, okay?”

So they gave us jobs. I was elated, even more so when I was issued my first Taser, scalpel, and empty ether canister. I was amazed that Jake’s brash ploy had such an effect on the bosses that we were given employment over all those other potentially qualified candidates.

Turns out everyone got a job that day; they were hard up for men. The organs had been selling like organs.

The Credit Union has always done a good business. From the first year of their inception, even with all the built-in liquidity drops, they have never once taken a loss on quarterly earnings. People buy artiforgs, plain and simple, and with today’s generous interest rates, there’s no end in sight. There was one point about eight years back when the average loans were coming in at 40, almost 50 percent, at which point a lot of people chose to take their chances with modern medicine rather than the repo corps. End up with more than one artiforg, and the payments can stack up quick. So the Union scaled back the percentages until the applicants started flooding back in. It’s a delicate balancing act, but they’ve got it down to a science by now.

“I’ve got a few million dollars of machinery in me,” Bonnie said as our subway ride came to an end. We hopped off the train and onto the platform, heading out of the station. Outside, a light rain had begun; we saw people entering the underground tunnels, shaking off their umbrellas, muttering about the weather.

“But you paid the loans off?”

“For a while. My husband was very wealthy—
we
were very wealthy—and we’d invested well.” She paused, shook her head. “Actually,
I’d
invested well, with his money. He didn’t know a thing about the market, but I put us in the right places at the right times. Had a lot of money in Union and supply-house stock, actually. We got lucky. Lucky enough, I guess, because interest alone was enough to keep us in the clear with the supply houses.”

“So far, so good,” I said as we made our way onto the street. The rain was coming down harder, pelting the ground in big, heavy drops. I lifted the duffel over Bonnie’s head, weapons and all, protecting her as we walked.

“So far, so good,” she agreed. “But it wasn’t enough. By the time I had recovered from all of the implantations, I was too far gone to have a baby. We tried IVF, we tried full fetal, everything short of growing the kid in a petri dish. Sure, they could implant a seed in that artiforg womb, but what kind of child could come out of a metal mom? It never took, and I was never surprised.

“I think that’s when Ken started to die a little. He still loved me, I know that, but there was a part of him that could never be fulfilled. He wanted a baby, and I was keeping him from it. We talked about adoption, but he wasn’t really into it; I could see that far-off look in his eyes; he was dreaming of dresses and football and chats about the prom. I wanted to make it right for him, to give him whatever he wanted, but it wasn’t in the cards for us anymore. And somehow, it was my fault.

“Two months later, he left me.”

I was thinking we should find a way to hook up Bonnie’s ex-husband with Beth, Mary-Ellen, and Carol. They’d get along like gangbusters.

We were nearing her friend’s apartment, but Bonnie continued with the story.

“He disappeared one night when I went to sleep. Left me a note, twenty typed pages, and yeah, clearly he’d been putting some thought into it for a while, but that’s all there was. Fifty grand in cash, but I didn’t want his money. That’s not what I was looking for.

“I guess it would have been pretty damned easy to just give up, but I’d already beaten up this cancer that no one beats up. Let them put all this metal in me. For Ken. For the baby we were supposed to have. So maybe it was better. I knew that Ken would try to cover, that he’d keep paying off the loans, but once we were separated, I wanted it to be a clean break. I didn’t want him to have to tell his new wife that they were in the hole for eighty-nine thousand dollars a month due to a missing ex. I got cancer on my own, so I’d deal with it on my own, repercussions and all. So I had the automatic payments switched to a personal account. Once the money in there ran out, the delinquent bills would start piling up, and then they’d be after me.”

“How long ago was that?” I asked her, amazed that there could be a woman this generous and kind and wonderful and screwed up all at the same time.

“Three years,” she said, staring up at the high-rise across the street. “Give or take. Come on, let’s go inside.”

Mary-Ellen left me, after a fashion, but not with such benevolent intentions. Our marriage lasted for eight months and three days, counting the period when I was still sleeping in our home—on the floor, by myself—yet not quite legally divorced. Housing crunch.

I came home at four in the morning after having worked a double shift, covering for Jake, who was off on some fox hunt of one of the Big Ten. Every once in a while, the Credit Union gets on a completist streak and sends out teams of Bio-Repo men to corral the most wanted; that year, we managed to round up 95 percent of the Big Hundred before finding new deadbeats to take their places. Commissions were good, but time was scarce.

I’d done five full repos in twenty-four hours’ time, with additional trips back to the Union for more ether and supplies. So I was beat when I got home, too tired to notice that most of the furniture in the living room was gone. Didn’t care about the missing television, either. My feet took me right into bed. Rather, they took me right to where the bed should have been. It wasn’t until I lay down on the cold, hard floor that I realized something was amiss.

Crashed around the house for a while, looking for an answer to this little puzzle, unable to find an explanation. I was already starting to accept the fact that my second marriage had come to a close, but I couldn’t believe that Mary-Ellen would be so coldhearted as to vanish without leaving a note.

When I finally gave up and stumbled into the bathroom to splash some water on my face, I saw the blood on the mirror. My first thoughts went to suicide, to a dead wife in the bathtub, wrists slit, a heady mixture of blame and guilt making me dizzy. But it was red lipstick and nothing more, scrawled across the bathroom walls in pure horror-movie fashion.

Good-bye, you bastard
, it read, stretching from the shower to the sink and back again.
There’s a meat loaf in the freezer
.

Concomitant with my five divorces were, of course, five teams of lawyers. Some, like those who represented Wendy, were kind enough in their own way, allowing me time and space to work things out on my own. Others, like those who represented Mary-Ellen, deserve to be ripped apart by ravenous hyenas. And if hyenas are out of season, tigers will do nicely.