The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (22 page)

Dr. Steffensen:
I find it interesting
that they draw the line at letting hearts and lungs grow to full size on Ms.
Gabrielli’s body. How is it not a strain on one’s system to have a dozen
maturing organs of other types growing from one’s skin?

Unidentified Transplant
Recipient, presented in silhouette, voice altered:
My body had rejected two liver
transplants already, and my doctor told me that he couldn’t get me on the list
for a third. Then we heard about Nell, and I have to admit, I was afraid. I
wasn’t sure I wanted a piece of her inside of me. What if it made me become
just like her? But in the end, I accepted it. It’s been difficult, though. I
can’t stop thinking about what might happen if it... I... (Fist goes up to
mouth.) I’ve started drinking again.

Megan Ferretti, NBS:
The issue of how best
to manage the national transplant list has become a political hot potato, and
not surprisingly, there’s been no official word from Washington on the Nell
Gabrielli situation. During this mid-term election cycle, no one wants to risk
alienating potential voters on either side of the issue. The Commonwealth of
Massachusetts assures us that they are monitoring the situation, but refused to
have an official connected to the case comment on-camera.

Nell Gabrielli:
Oh yeah, someone from
the state checks in on me every month to make sure I’m still okay with
volunteering. I’m still the only person who can do this, right? So I gotta keep
doing it. If I don’t, people will die, right? It’d be nice if they found
someone else who could do it, though. Then maybe I wouldn’t have to grow so
much all at once.

Father Cleary:
I pray to God every
day to give Ms. Gabrielli strength. And I pray to God every day that He not
give any other person the same gift. What a heavy burden it must be. God
chooses our trials for us, and there are times that I wish He wouldn’t impose
such difficult ones on such innocent people.

Richard Forrest:
There are plenty of
people out there who like to say, “Look, it’s not like the woman was doing
anything important before this happened. At least her life has meaning now.”
They may be right, but I’d still challenge them to imagine themselves in her
shoes. Perhaps we should see this as an indictment of the society that left Ms.
Gabrielli with so few options in life that she was willing to become a
one-woman organ farm. Ask yourself: could you see the president’s son in Ms.
Gabrielli’s place? He’s not doing anything important with his life either.
Well, unless you think becoming the poster boy for DUI is important work.

Dr. Steffensen:
How convenient was it
for them to find this ability in a lower-class, unemployed, undereducated woman
with no children and no strong family ties. I wonder how many other people have
this ability and are having it kept quiet by their family doctors? I certainly
wouldn’t let any of my family be used this way.

Dr. Burbage:
Of course, our goal is
to find a way to isolate the specific genes in Nell’s body that cause her to
produce these tissues and organs.

Megan Ferretti, NBS:
There is real fear in
the medical community that, if these genes are isolated, gene therapy could be
created to turn other people into organ farms. Hospitals might pressure
families of coma patients to allow them to use their bodies this way in
exchange for lowering the cost of their hospitalization. And, of course, there
are whispers of nightmare scenarios, such as the homeless being given this
treatment in exchange for room and board, or prisoners in countries with poor
human rights records being forced to grow organs against their will.

Dr. Burbage:
No, of course we’re
not interested in asking anyone else to volunteer to grow organs and tissues.
It’s wonderful that Nell is so willing, but we’d never deliberately do this to
another human being. What we’re instead hoping to do is to find a way to use
her genes to grow organs in a laboratory setting. Unfortunately, that day is
still at least a decade away, if not more.

Dr. Steffensen:
They’ll never make this
work in the lab. They’re just saying that to string their patient along. If
they have their way, she’ll be there for the rest of her life.

Nell Gabrielli:
If this all stopped
tomorrow, what would I do? (Stares into space without answering.)

Jarel Padovano:
They say she’s started
growing hearts. I’ve been waiting for one for years, but they keep passing me
by. They say it’s because other people are sicker than me, but I know it’s
because of all the time I spent in prison. I know it. If I can just get a new
heart, I’ll make a clean start of it. Just you watch. That woman is my only
hope.

Dr. Burbage:
I’m so grateful to
Nell. We all are. She’s a living miracle, and I am so honored to have been able
to help her give this gift of hers to the world.

Nell Gabrielli:
It’s...it’s tough.
Yeah. Every day, I wish it had happened to someone else and not me. (Sighs and
prods lump under her shirt.) But it did. And it’s important. So I guess it’s
good that I’m here. Isn’t it?

A Night at the Empire

Joy Marchand

Between nightmares about mail
sorters that reeked of brimstone, Len dreamed of his workstation at the Salem
post office. In his dream, the computer had become part of his thigh, and the
proximity of its motherboard to his groin had given him erectile dysfunction
and prostate cancer.

It wasn’t hard to guess what
that was about.

Len walked
to work in a snowstorm, feeling older, balder, and lonelier than ever. He
couldn’t work up the energy to hate Lizzie for leaving, so he hated her
cyber-age Don Juan instead—the high-speed internet connection, the Teflon chin
implants, the LoveMatch.com tagline:

Net-savvy Senior Seeks
Virtual Goddess With Webcam.

The hate boiled his brain. He
dreamed stop-motion silent films, mailroom mayhem made dramatic with the
wailing of oboes, the tinkling of a player piano.

As always, Len felt his mood
lift as he passed the Empire Theater. He yearned for an evening in its dusty
black and white paradise, sitting among like-minded strangers in the fluttering
darkness, undeniably alone and yet buoyed by anonymous trembles of laughter, gratified
by gasps of fright and moans of sympathy. He craned his neck at the brick
theater front, but the marquee still read C-O-M-I-N-G S-O-O-N, so he trudged
on, the wind whipping away his body heat. No one went to the movies any more;
they stayed home and flipped cable channels, cruised chat rooms where they lost
themselves in anonymous venom.

The poor bastards. The browsing
dead.

People lined the steps of the
post office, shielding their bundles from the blowing snow. A disturbed
rumbling centered on a woman in a green chenille scarf, who was fighting to
keep her fluttering newspaper open against a flurry. “Third one this week
already,” she announced to the huddled masses. “Dead from heart failure, and
his TV gone. They say someone’s waiting for people to die, then stealing their
televisions and laptops and cellular phones.” She snatched Len’s arm as he
passed. “You think they could let us in early? Page five says they found
someone frozen to death on Washington Street.”

Len disengaged his arm from the
woman’s grip and slipped past the bulb-nosed Irishman guarding the door. As
usual, Len said, “Hey, Sully, why don’t we let ‘em in,” and, as usual, Sully
glared at Len around his cell phone and mouthed, “Shut the fuck up,” and it was
settled, although not to Len’s satisfaction.

The computerized workstation
felt like the visitor’s window of a federal prison. Len’s neighboring inmate,
Keith The Mouth-Breather, had a habit of sharing little gems of philanthropy as
he polished his view screen. “Any one of dose people out there could be the TV
thief. Ya think of that?” Keith slapped a box of sanitary wipes beside his
register, his fingers wet and pink inside latex gloves. When he got no response
from Len beyond a look of disgust, Keith wriggled a gloved finger into his ear
to touch a forbidden cell phone ear bud. Keith wore the ear piece constantly,
and stroked a handheld e-mail whatsit on every smoke break as if it were the
girlfriend he’d never have. When asked what he found so interesting coming in
over the wireless, Keith just gave a look that said the answer was fucking
obvious.

Len wondered if Lizzie still
lived that way, shielded from reality behind a curtain of constant input. He
wondered if she still had sex with her geriatric lover in antiseptic
keystrokes. He wondered if she’d strayed because he hadn’t given her enough of
whatever it was she had needed. Whatever it was that Keith got out of his
e-mail device.

Goddamned mystifying, that’s
what it was.

Sully let the customers in, and
Len chewed over the Lizzie dilemma in the mind-numbing void of metering mail
and dispensing stamps until right before noon, when the bastardly computerized
workstation went toes-up. Red-faced, Sully shoved a Polaroid at Len. “Old fuck
wants a passport photo. Make sure he can pay.”

An old man had come to the
counter, his face an aggravated pucker between a navy beret and the prodigious
coils of a scarf. “I can pay for the photograph.” The accent was French, the
hot breath like compost in summer. Tucked under the man’s arm was a squishy
garbage bag that burped a miasma of stale beer even less pleasant than the
stink of its owner’s tooth decay. “These pig never think I can pay, but I can
pay.”

Len watched a foul wad of
greenbacks unfurl in the cup of the old man’s withered palm. Keith’s lips drew
back in a feral grin of disgust, and Len resisted the urge to kick him under
the counter. He hefted the camera. “You need a proof of citizenship to get a
passport, sir, but a photo is just eight bucks.”

“The photo,
oui
, the
photo.” The old man tottered to the photo backdrop where he dropped his trash
bag and clutched a leather case close to his heart. When he offered a toothless
grin like the yawn of an ancient turtle, Len couldn’t help but smile back. So
few people smiled any more; it was like finding ten bucks in the street.

“I’ll put the picture in a
reinforced envelope for you,” he said, “if you’re mailing it overseas.”

The old man bellied up to the
counter, his expression wary. “You are kind,” he said, “not like these
cochons
dégoûtants
.” He set a worn leather case on the counter. “I have motion
pictures camera. You shoot some footage of me,
oui
? For my family.” A
starving man hoping for a crust, the old man put a deeply lined hand on Len’s
wrist. “I need this very much. You like cameras,
non
?”

“I think most machines suck
your humanity out through your eyeballs.” Len gently disengaged his arm. “But
this old camera isn’t hurting anybody. It’s almost like watching a magic trick.
The image develops so slowly—like it’s waiting for you to want to see yourself
bad enough before it gives you the goods.”

The look on the old man’s face
had changed in the course of the conversation, his twisted cockle of wrinkles
relaxing, until his true face lay revealed, pink and moist and somehow
youthful. He pressed a twig-like finger to his old leather case and spoke as
softly as an addict sharing a tidbit of coveted dream stuff. “Never doubt,
monsieur
.
Some machine, she help you see good.”

They’d come together over the
counter in sympathy, Len and the old man, but Keith slammed the box of sanitary
wipes on the counter between them and they sprang apart. Keith smoothed his
hair as Napoleon might have done had he worn a thinning mullet. “Time for
mon
frère
to move along.”

Before Len could say anything,
the old man snatched up his garbage bag, shouldered the camera case and stormed
out into the snow blanketing Washington Street. With the plastic bag banging
into his knees, the old man hobbled through traffic, unmindful of the piss
trail of beer he was leaving in the snow. His grip on the camera was far less
casual; he cradled it as if he were afraid the passing cars would tear it from
him. Once across the street, he glanced furtively around, and then vanished
into the entrance of the Empire Theater. The precarious marquee had been
updated: SUSPIRIA! KILL, BABY, KILL!! DEVIL’S NITEMARE!!!

Wistful, Len smashed the box of
wipes into Keith’s concave chest and yanked the miniature cell phone out of his
ear with an audible plop. “Would it have killed you to be nice to the poor bastard?
Christ, Keith. He’s just a lonely old man.”

Keith snatched at his cell
phone like a toddler deprived of its lollipop, and Sully gave a merciless bark
of laughter. From that point on he filtered the undesirables into Len’s line.
Len had his stapler stolen by a bag lady in a pink rain slicker, and had to
call Sully over to remove a nut job who insisted Len speak into the empty
battery compartment of a micro-cassette recorder. While Len worked, he glanced
periodically at the sign across the street:
Welcome to the Empire
.