The Compatible
by Jeffrey Greene
The little things hadn’t fazed him — the hair transplant, the skin graft after the motorcycle accident that cured him of his open-road phase — but since Mr. Koeppen had gotten the news that he needed a new heart, he hadn’t been sleeping well and doubted he ever would again until he met the man, so he’d waved his wand, signed the proper forms and waivers, and now he was flying the company jet to the Nevada Black Zone to meet “Amir.”
Everyone, including his new wife, Marisa, had been against the idea, and the last thing in the world the Black Card holders he knew wanted to do was meet their Compatible. He told Marisa, with a morbid jocularity that fell flat, that he was actually killing two birds since, according to his cardiologist, his medical situation was “in downward flux,” and he might as well have the surgery onsite at the Black Zone’s top-flight facility.
He couldn’t have explained to her or, for that matter, to himself, why he felt it necessary to meet the man. Certainly not to thank him or, to apologize or, God forbid, to void the contract. One paid the freight, whatever it cost in fees, taxes, surcharges and bribes to get one’s Compatible out of whatever hole he’d dug for himself — in this case a heroin-smuggling charge that carried the death penalty — and after both parties had signed a stack of documents and one had deposited the agreed-upon sum in a bank of the Compatible’s choice to compensate his family, the now-officially nameless and stateless Black Card was transported to the Black Zone area geographically closest to the holder of his card, areas designated Extra-National, heavily guarded facilities exempt from most of the laws of the host country. And after that, nothing was expected of either party except to fulfill the terms of the contract.
A “devil’s bargain,” the anti-everything crowd called that contract, but it was a business deal to which both parties had to agree, and if the Compatible was not proven to be in full possession of his faculties and was not accompanied to the signing by a licensed Black Card Advocate, the deal was off. The fact that only the very rich could afford to buy their own personal, blood-type-matching source of spare parts was not legally relevant. Most of the Black Card holders that Mr. Koeppen knew felt that the moral posturing and public outrage over the International Black Card Agreement was mostly disguised envy. He felt that way, too, most of the time, but he still couldn’t sleep.
At first glance, Valley View looked like a quiet desert town, as long as one ignored the razor-wire perimeter and uniformed guards patrolling the city limits. From a distance, the buildings appeared to have been constructed entirely out of white PVC material, except for the hospital, of course, which was a lavishly appointed glass-and-steel monument to several dozen billionaires’ denial of death.
Valley View wasn’t exactly a prison — more like a waiting room with satellite TV — even though the residents weren’t allowed to leave the premises or have anything like ropes, belts or knives in their possession. They were doing wonderful things these days with nano-structures, and you couldn’t make a shank out of a Black Zone toothbrush if your life — or death, the joke ran — depended on it. At a certain angle of pressure it just crumbled away in your hands. The incidence of suicide was remarkably low in Black Zones worldwide, “but a few slip through our fingers,” the Director, a Mr. Razbadowski, told him as he led the way to Amir’s cubicle.
There was the Black Card holder involved in a bad auto accident, losing both his left arm and left leg (which seemed worse somehow, the Director mused, than left/right), and because the limbs were too damaged for reattachment, the Compatible was contractually obligated to donate his own limbs.
“A difficult case,” Mr. Razbadowski said. “Not that the heart or liver donors are any easier,” he added, with a trace of malice. He clearly didn’t approve of this highly irregular face-to-face meeting with Amir. “Not more than a month after the operation, the man managed to drink enough water to induce hyponatremia. Literally drank himself to death. Bonus points for creativity, though of course we had to fire the surveillance officer on duty. Inexcusable carelessness. He should have hit the button after the fourth glass.”
“I assume he’s been informed,” Mr. Koeppen said, looking up at the Director from his wheelchair (doctor’s orders, though he had to resist the urge to get up and kick it over, bad heart be damned).
“In writing, as procedure dictates,” the Director said.
“And he still agreed to see me?”
“God knows why. Maybe for the chance to spit in your face. Or beg for mercy. Hard to say with Amir. He’s one of the quiet ones.”
“That’s not his real name?”
The Director shook his head. “They can’t legally use their given names, and no one wants to be addressed by his ID number. They don’t leave here alive, you know, unless their card holder sells it to someone else, in which case they might be transferred to another Black Zone. In either case, the Card’s a one-way ticket. Best they can hope for is that their card holder’s as healthy as a bull. Then, of course, the time hangs heavy. Can’t let them do too much besides routine exercise and busy work. Risk of injury, damaged goods, you understand.”
The man was beginning to irritate him. “Do you enjoy your work, Mr. Razbadowski?” he asked, licking his lips. His mouth was getting drier and his heart rate increasing the closer they got to the cubicle. They stopped before a white door at the end of a long corridor of identical numbered doors.
“My salary is three times what the position merits,” the Director replied, brushing a piece of lint off his lapel. “And from her eyrie at Amherst, my daughter despises me.” He knocked softly. A small green light, set next to a red one under the numbers, blinked once, and the Director entered. “Wait here a moment, please,” he said, leaving the door ajar.
Koeppen heard murmuring voices, then the door opened and the Director stood aside as he wheeled himself into a tiny room into which was crowded a single bed, a chair and table, and a wide-screen television that was on with the sound muted. There was a strong smell of cigarettes in the room, although “Amir” wasn’t smoking now. He caught himself wondering how many other rules got bent around here under the Director’s liberal interpretation of the Black Zone charter, and winced with shame. The condemned man can smoke all he wants, he thought. It wasn’t a lung transplant he needed.
Amir, as Mr. Koeppen had been informed upon purchasing his Black Card six years before, was a Pakistani Muslim, tried and sentenced to death for heroin smuggling, sentence suspended rather than commuted, to be carried out the moment he refused to fulfill his contractual obligations to the holder of his card. He was now thirty-seven years old and, as he slowly, almost indifferently turned his head to see the man who would soon have his healthy young heart, Mr. Koeppen, his own sclerotic, seventy-year old heart making his whole body move in rhythmic sympathy with its struggling beats, was relieved to see that his Compatible looked every inch the career criminal he was. His glistening, incurious eyes, shadowed both by heavy black brows and dark circles hanging in crepe-like folds that belied his relative youth, stickily settled on him and stayed there, not quite meeting his gaze. His thin red lips, slightly misshapen by a vertical scar running from above his mustache and disappearing into his chin whiskers, parted as if he were about to speak, but he didn’t.
His untrimmed black beard was in startling contrast to the bare scalp running in a weirdly symmetrical swath from forehead to crown, the legacy of Mr. Koeppen’s feeling that a new head of thick, wavy Kashmiri hair would do wonders for his self-esteem. It hadn’t quite lived up to its promise. First he’d tried dyeing his gray fringe black to match the transplant, but the effect had been more embarrassing than revitalizing, so he’d decided on graying the whole thing and keeping his new hair short and brushed forehead in the Roman senatorial style.
Amir was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved denim shirt, and worn black sandals, and Mr. Koeppen wondered from what part of the man’s body they’d harvested the square foot of skin needed for his graft after the motorcycle accident three years before. He also realized, with something like panic, that he hadn’t the faintest notion what to say to the man.
Perhaps anticipating this, the Director came to his rescue. “You’ll be wanting some privacy. I’ll return in about fifteen minutes,” he said, closing the door behind him.
The instantly oppressive silence was broken by Mr. Koeppen, who said something that startled himself at least as much as it did Amir: “Now would be a good time to kill me. I doubt they could stop you in time.”
Amir’s damaged lips formed a sour smile as he pointed the remote and turned off the television. “The act of a desperate man,” he said in surprisingly unaccented English. “Rendering the contract null and void. My family would have to readjust to poverty. Your death isn’t worth that to me.”
“I thought revenge was a matter of policy... in your line of work,” Koeppen said.
“You’ve done nothing to me,” Amir said. “I read the contract and signed it. A far better deal than the one I was facing.”
“But I’m seventy, and you’re thirty-seven,” he said. “You die so that a sick, aging man can keep up with a third wife who’s younger than his daughter. And I’ll buy another card, too, after you’re gone. New knees, new prostate, new corneas, new cock, anything I happen to need. In ten years there won’t be much left of the original me, but chances are I’ll still be here, and richer than I am now. I paid your family in pocket change.”
“If you’d really regretted it, you would have sold my card to someone else,” Amir said quietly. “And you didn’t fly a thousand miles just to provoke me. Why are you here, Mr. Koeppen? Is it my forgiveness you want? Okay, I forgive you. Feel better now?”
“Why did you agree to see me?”
“Why not? I had a little time to spare between TV shows.”
“What kind of a man just sits there while a stranger steals his life? It’s obscene, disgusting. It diminishes me to have the heart of a lump of nothing like you.”
For the first time, Amir turned his whole body to face him. “You don’t have it yet,” he said.
“But I will. In forty-eight hours I’ll be in recovery and you’ll be in the morgue.”
Amir laughed, his large teeth very white against the black of his beard. “Now I understand. Your type doesn’t want forgiveness. You want my hatred. If I die hating you, then you can hate me back in good conscience, and my heart in your chest will just be the spoils of another victory. A wasted trip, Mr. Koeppen. You couldn’t pay me enough to hate you.”
Koeppen wiped his sweating palms on his pants, feeling his heart laboring blindly to keep him alive, then turned himself around and wheeled toward the door. With his hand on the knob, he paused. “If you had the means to kill yourself right now, would you do it?” he asked. “Screw your family to spite me?”
Amir looked at him as if restraining an urge to spit. “You forget: I owe you the last six years of my life. And now the bill’s come due. You’ve delivered it, now get the hell out of here.”
He met Razbadowski in the corridor. “Is the surgeon ready to meet me?” he asked with a brusqueness that made him feel better.
The Director nodded. “The elevator’s this way.”
Copyright © 2022 by Jeffrey Greene
