The doctors never dirtied themselves with the bodies. No, the patients who did not survive the surgeries were disposed by the nurses and assisted by the orderlies. I was there to answer the phone, deliver paperwork to patients, and make that paperwork disappear when patients needed to disappear. I was the secretary.
When I was hired at nine dollars a hour, my mom sent me a coffee mug to celebrate my employment: Always be yourself, because everyone else is taken. I stared at it during dull times, wondering if it was possible that I could still be someone else, at the same time that they were themselves, too. I really didn’t see why it wasn’t possible.
The doctors, Geta and Severus, who co-owned the medical clinic, collected fresh organs from patients, which they then sold to other patients who needed them. I assumed, given the finite amount of quality organs, these “needy” patients were not needy in other ways, mainly in their bank accounts.
The patients whom I greeted at my desk, however, were needy.
Looking into the eyes of the first timers wasn’t difficult. There was shame, sure, but that was nothing a friendly, understanding smile couldn’t fix and with some coaxing I could retrieve their hopes and dreams for the money that they would receive.
The returnees, who already had files with their names in the room of labeled folders, were burdensome patients. Some returnees still held on to their dreams, telling anyone who would listen that they just needed a little bit more money. A few more returnees were supporting addictions, whether to drugs, women, or other distractions. They sat in the waiting room making promises to themselves that this would be the last time, while knowing it was all a lie, since they had promised the same promise before.
The worst returnees were those who had given up all hope. I didn’t understand what motivated them to sell their organs. I peered into their eyes to search for their dreams, but I saw nothing but despair. Why did they bother?
I’m not sure if my employers had ever planned to tell me directly that some of the surgeries failed or if it was easier to impart the secrecy of the mistakes if I observed the situation and chose to keep my mouth shut rather than be told to. While taking a smoke break beside the dumpsters, I saw a car squeeze in between the alley behind the clinic. Two inconspicuous men emerged. I recognized them as bad men, men whom I did my best to not be seen by. I wanted to hide but there was no where to go. So I stood there, continuing to smoke, with the determined expression of, “I see nothing. I hear nothing. I am nothing.”
One gave me a side, searching stare. Either recognizing me as the secretary or realizing I wasn’t anything worth worrying about, they proceeded to open the trunk. About the same time an orderly walked out of the same back door I had escaped before with an oblong package in plastic sheeting. I knew what was going on. I became more determined to look less interested or interesting.
Later on in the day I was handed a name on a sticky note: Perpetua Smith. The nurse told me to “make her disappear.” First, I shredded her neatly completed paperwork. Then I changed the online schedule to place the doctors in their offices writing notes instead of performing surgery. I assigned all of the materials used in her surgery to other surgeries completed that day to not disturb inventory. And then I sat at my desk, looked at my coffee mug, and wondered if she had a mother, too.
Months passed by. Every week three souls disappeared without a trace, with my help. I prayed for them, but I felt I couldn’t do more. There weren’t jobs out there and if I quit, I might be in the waiting room myself before long. Besides, I knew too much to be allowed to quit. I know what those bad men were capable of.
One afternoon, coming back from an errand in the back, I felt the unexplained urging to look over the waiting room in detail, as if I knew a part of my fate was sitting there. One of the nurses had already handed him paperwork, which his head was hunched over. His hair was shorter and darker but I would know those shoulder arches anywhere. I sat silently at my desk, feeling my shallow breath, wondering what to do. Would he recognize me? Should I wait until he turns in his paperwork to attract his attention?
My God, what was he doing here?
Decades went by while I waited for his notice. I thought back to the last time I saw him. He was at the third floor of an apartment building, waving sadly to me from the patio while I squinted up at him. An angry phone call was the last time I heard his voice. I tried to remember the date but the pressing of the moment kept me from thinking clearly to the past. I attempted to do something – anything! – but always found myself looking back at him.
Finally. The moment of truth. He walked with his pigeon toed feet to my desk, keeping his head down, surprisingly looking like a returnee. Seeing his face for the first time, I witnessed how life alone had aged him drastically. He looked ten years older than me, although I randomly remembered that he was four months younger.
He laid the paperwork on my desk and finally looked me in the face.
“Felicity. What are you doing here?”
“I work here.”
“But… why are you in Oklahoma? Why aren’t you back home?”
“I live here now. What are you doing here, Revy?”
He seemed at a loss for words.
After all these years, I had nothing to say to him, although I already knew this conversation would replay in my mind forever and I would think of hundreds of other things I could have said to him now.
I sighed.
“Where’s the rest of your paperwork?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the contact information and prior medical history. Why didn’t you complete that?”
It was a rhetorical question as I stood up from my desk and walked without notice to the room with labeled folders. I found his name. I found his folder. I glanced inside. This would be his fourth visit.
Walking back to my desk, I thought of a thousand things I wanted to say to him to make him turn around and walk out that door, but I was a different woman and he was a different man. The years of love between us had disappeared and we were just cogs in a machine, marionettes on strings, ants in an elaborate ant farm.
Stop feeling, I told myself.
“I found your folder. I’ll schedule you now.”
I grabbed the mouse of my computer in an attempt to become suddenly impartial, but was seized by a force beyond myself. I couldn’t allow him to go into that operation room. I had to save one person, at least.
“Revy. Don’t do this. You won’t survive. No one comes back from the fourth time.”
“That’s the point, Felicity.”
I sat in shock. I whispered back with steel in my voice, “What?”
He leaned in so that his face with inches from mine and I saw clearly things I had never seen before in his eyes but had seen countless times before in returnees. A despair I had been unable to explain. But Revy was going to explain it to me now. And his voice was a voice I had never heard from any living voice before. The sound of naked fear… and hate… and accusation.
“Don’t you think we know that no one survives the fourth time? Why, Felicity, why do you think people come back for a fourth time? Do you think we’re that stupid that we haven’t figure out this will be the end?”
I sat in shock, my fingers still on the mouse.
“But you’re better than this, Revy.”
“No, I’m not. And you’re not, either.”
He hesitated as if he too wanted to say more, closed his eyes, and shuffled back to his seat.
I placed his paperwork in a folder, scheduled his operation, filed insurance papers, and looked at my coffee mug. I didn’t want to be myself. I didn’t want Revy to be himself either. I wondered though, if really anyone else was any better.
When he was called back, I took a smoke break. After breathing in the tobacco of one cigarette, I smoked another. And another. I smoked the whole damn pack and wanted more.
When I went back to my desk, I found his name on a sticky note, like I thought I would.