Second Life. Paul Griner
Copyright © 2015 Paul Griner
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Griner, Paul.
Second life : a novel / Paul Griner.
pages ; cm
1. Dead--Fiction. 2. Organ trafficking--Fiction. 3. Medical fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.R5314S43 2015
813’.54--dc23
2014033798
ISBN 978-1-61902-523-3
Cover design by Charles Brock, Faceout Studios
Interior Design by Tabitha Lahr
Soft Skull Press
An Imprint of COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Laura, Paul, and Clara Hill
You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.
—Epictetus
My soul-bird loves my body-cage only when it is kept fit, pure, and absolutely immaculate.
—Sri Chinmoy, Ten Thousand Flower-Flames
CONTENTS
Her body is missing.
What? I said, still waking up, the darkness humming around me. I shifted the phone to my other ear, thinking I’d misheard.
Lia’s body, it’s missing, Mrs. Stefanini said. Can you help, Elena? Please?
The normal question would be, How does a body go missing? But I’d been in the business long enough to know that bodies often did. Once someone died, all kinds of things could happen. After the family left, if there was family, a nurse or an attendant took the body down to the morgue on a service elevator so the public wouldn’t see it, an understandable sleight of hand. Commendable, even.
The body was trundled off to the morgue in a mostly silent last walk, signed in, and left. The diener had it then, and I’d been a diener, so I knew the routines that followed. The paperwork, the cleaning of the body, the autopsy and the phone calls: to an undertaker, if one had been specified, to the coroner, if there’d been a crime, to the med school, if interns and med students needed to practice intubation and catheterization. To the body brokers, if the body wasn’t claimed.
None of that for Lia, it seemed, save perhaps the body broker.
Still, I was surprised that Mrs. Stefanini had called. I hadn’t known that Lia was dead, for one thing, and I hadn’t heard from the Stefaninis for three years, and the last time I had, Mrs. Stefanini herself told me never to call again.
Now, her voice unnaturally loud in the dark, she said, She crashed on the other side of the river and they brought her back to operate. Then she disappeared. We can’t find her. Won’t you please help? I can’t go through this another time.
It was crossing the river that gave rise to my memories of body brokering. How many bodies had I ferried across it myself? Victims of car and motorcycle accidents, gunshots both intentional and accidental, strokes, drownings, poisonings, hangings and domestic violence, old age and cancer, ruptured veins, failed kidneys, bad hearts.
The list was nearly endless, sometimes peculiar (one man who drank too much water), usually predictable (people who drank too much alcohol), occasionally piercing (a child who drank a gallon of blue antifreeze, thinking it Kool-Aid), but ultimately numbing, because as their numbers climbed, your sensitivity lessened and your connection to life altered in ways even now you don’t fully understand.
You began to think you carried with you everywhere the scent of the dead, a taint that even a savage scrubbing couldn’t remove, and that made you more than mildly paranoid, so that you went out less often. The rare times you did meet someone it was only for a quick hook-up, and even then it was easy to note their skin tone and study their limbs, thinking of them as product. Tibias first, then the fibula, long and lean and lucrative, and the spine, the spine, the golden spine, which, as you ran your fingers up the knobs of some stray companion, making your temporary bedmate shiver, made it nearly impossible not to calculate cost and profit, or how you’d peel their skin and bag it, since those long, smoked-salmon colored strips of skin came at such a premium, $1,000