Bible Stories for Adults (11 page)

I hiked up the bluff, walked through the wind-smoothed grass, and ambled across the veranda. Intimations of Kristin were everywhere. Her collection of kitschy pictures—a calendar infested with kittens, a watercolor of a child mesmerized by a bunny—cluttered the walls. Over the fireplace, the framed cover of a movie star magazine displayed the highly dental face of the Hollywood actor Rainsford Spawn.

I took myself on a cursory tour. Our other members, I discovered, had already set about their duties. Jagged notes of recorded rock music—the notorious Tinker's Damn album
Flesh before Breakfast
—blasted through the door to Maggie Yost's room. By nightfall, I knew, the poor woman would have the audial equivalent of eyestrain and a prolific case of diarrhea. Noting that the door to Lisha DuPreen's room was also closed, I surmised she must be making love to whichever fellow she'd imported for the purpose. During the rest of the year, as it happened, Lisha DuPreen had little use for men. She was not maladjusted, nor unemotional. She simply didn't care for that particular gender.

I peeked into the basement. Sure enough, Kendra Kelty had set up her laser disc player and was attempting to engross herself in an old Rainsford Spawn movie,
The Last Aztec.
Kendra Kelty thought that every picture Rainsford Spawn ever made was a colossal bore and that Rainsford Spawn himself was a misogynist and a Nazi. Kendra suffered in silence.

I returned to the living room. Dr. Dorn Markle, the Kristinite who hated water—who believed that to venture ten feet into the Atlantic was to court deadly undercurrents and offer oneself to platoons of sharks—had just returned from his swim. Droplets spilled from his body, making ephemeral stains on the hardwood floor. His was the misery of a wet cat.

“Hi, Dorn.” I extended my donated hand, the one the surgeon had stitched onto me, and our fingers intertwined.

“Howdy.” Dorn had wondrous eyes: large, luminous, green. He was a walking advertisement for his optometry business.

“Scrumptious weather.”

“Hope it lasts till Sunday.”

Profound conversation was rare during Kristin Week.

I sauntered onto the veranda. Billy Silk, a man both physiologically and morally allergic to alcoholic beverages, sat on a chaise lounge, sipping apricot wine. A moment later Wesley Ransom appeared. Wesley despised all things athletic. He found any form of exercise excruciating. He had been out jogging.

The pain on Wesley's face, I could tell, did not owe entirely to his recent run. This Kristinite harbored troubled thoughts.

“Greetings, Billy. Salutations, John.” Martyr's sweat rolled down Wesley's face. “Glad I accosted you two together. There's a matter we should discuss, a matter most dire.”
Salutations, accosted, a matter most dire:
such was the sort of diction Wesley Ransom liked concocting for himself. He couldn't get over being an actor.

“Dire?” Billy poured wine into a plastic cup that had once belonged to Kristin. The cup bore an image of a teddy bear. I liked Billy. He was a vegetarian computer programmer who heard elves whispering amid the memory boards.

“It's like this,” said Wesley. “Being a Kristinite doesn't mean anything to me anymore, not a rat's ass. I don't believe in our Society. It's . . . unreasonable.”

Billy, the spiritual one, was more offended than I, the math teacher. “It hurts me to hear such talk from you, Wesley. You of all people—with that heart of yours . . .”

“Here's the nub of it, confreres. I'm quitting.”

I guess Billy had emptied Kristin's teddy bear cup once too often, because he actually began to cry: not fully orchestrated bawling, but choked sobs akin to the unspontaneous noise of a dog barking on command. “You
can't
leave. Think of what you're saying. Think of Kristin.”

“We need a formal meeting,” I offered, trying to sound neutral but inwardly sharing Billy's horror. “All eight of us. Together.”

Wesley licked sweat from his upper lip. “Tonight? After dinner?”

“Tonight,” moaned Billy. “After dinner,” he wailed.

 

New York City, they say, is the place on our planet where you're most likely to run into someone you know. When I first ran into Kendra Kelty, of course, I didn't know that I knew her, nor did she know that she knew me.

We were waiting to purchase tickets in the Port Authority Bus Terminal. I was bound for Boston, having recently endured a math teachers' conference on “Einstein, General Relativity, and the Fifth Grade.” Kendra was returning to Philadelphia. She played in the orchestra: a flautist. All around us, itinerant peddlers hawked worthless wristwatches and dubious ashtrays. Derelicts hugged the tiled walls, talking to people who weren't there.

I was drawn to Kendra from the moment I saw her. Fleshly sparks united us. It was not a sexual attraction—not in its essence—though surely that was part of it: her mouth was so erotic it should have been clothed. We abandoned our respective lines spontaneously and in perfect synchronization. Feigning hunger, we wandered toward a vending machine. Kendra inserted a fistful of quarters, pushed a button, and obtained a watercress sandwich she did not want to eat and a cup of coffee she did not want to drink. She was at once svelte and earthy, qualities I had previously regarded as mutually exclusive.

When my turn came, the mechanized cornucopia gave me a candy bar, a fig stick, and some carbonated ice tea.

“Your hands don't match,” was the first thing Kendra Kelty ever said to me.

“Very observant,” I replied. “This is the hand I was born with,” I continued, touching her shoulder tentatively with my right index finger. “And this one”—I removed the microcomputer that concealed the scar encircling my left wrist—“comes from an organ bank.”

“What happened?”

“Shark.”

“A shark attacked you?”

“No. In truth, a boring dog bite followed by a mundane infection followed by a routine transplant.”

An irrefutable fact hung in the air: neither of us would be going to our respective home cities that night.

“I'm not all myself either,” Kendra confessed. “Look into my eyes.”

“I've done that.”

“Look closer.”

I did. Kendra's left eye was the color of jade. Her right was the color of pea soup.

“Glider crash,” she said, touching her left tear duct. “A sliver of glass. The whole shebang had to come out, retina included, plus nerves and a gob of visual cortex. It took them two months to find a match this good.”

We ventured into the nocturnal city. Forty-second Street was a loud and ghoulish bazaar. Flashing lights; flesh for sale; pay as you come. We talked, testing our rapport. When a scream issued from the nearest sex boutique, I put my arm around Kendra. The sparks oscillating between us grew hotter.

That same night, Wesley Ransom joined our company. Kendra and I had alighted in a twenty-four-hour café, the Holistic Donut. The waitress was rude. Wesley entered on the run. He rushed toward us like a nail encountering a magnet.

“I was down in the Village,” Wesley panted. “The Fawnshaven
Lear
opens tonight,” he shouted, displaying his ticket, “and suddenly I find myself leaving the line”—his voice built to a shriek—“and
sprinting
uptown! I hate
sprinting!
”

“Let me make a wild guess,” I said. “Part of you is not you.”

“Correct.”

“Which part?”

“Heart.”

The truth took hold of me, scary and exhilarating as the Barnstable County Fair roller coaster. “By any chance . . . the Cavanaugh Organ Bank?”

“Quite so,” Wesley replied.

“On Twenty-third Street?”

“Yes.”

“Me too,” said Kendra.

“Me too,” I said.

 

Three entirely separate lives, unconnected cords of aspiration and protoplasm, one night intertwined by—by whom? Who was this benefactor whose eye, hand, and heart we shared? We needed a base of operations, something more intimate than the Holistic Donut. A crumbag hotel, the Mackintosh on Sixty-first Street, was the only choice compatible with Wesley's budget: he refused to become indebted to Kendra and me so early in our relationship—unemployed actors are prideful creatures. Room 256 was available. We took it. The cracked walls looked like floodplain maps. The three of us talked till dawn.

Our civilization features two kinds of secretaries: those who prove so miserably unhelpful you want to throttle them, and those who grasp their institutions' inner workings so profoundly their bosses would be doing well to know half as much. Luckily, it was the second type who answered our videophone call to the Cavanaugh Organ Bank.

“No,” the secretary lectured, “our records are not confidential.” She was a stately woman with gems embedded in her teeth. “This isn't an adoption agency.
Au contraire
, since Dr. Raskindle took over, we've been encouraging recipients to contact the families of donors.”

“To express their gratitude?” asked Kendra.

The head on the screen nodded, flashing a garnet smile.

“That's what we want to do,” I said hastily. “Express our gratitude.”

The secretary told all. Our mutual benefactor, source of our implanted portions, was a twenty-year-old female named Kristin Alcott. She had drowned three years ago in the undertow off Falmouth, Cape Cod. Her brain had died totally; her other tissues came through unharmed. Skeleton, kidneys, spleen, and a half-dozen other vitals were still at the Cavanaugh Bank. The rest had been taken off ice and distributed.

“Any living relatives?” asked Kendra.

We learned of an elderly mother, Merribell Alcott, judged “eccentric” by the Cavanaugh Bank's computer. A Chicago address, no phone number. We thanked the secretary and hung up.

A critical mass had formed. Hour after hour, segments of Kristin arrived at the Mackintosh Hotel, Room 256.

First came the optometrist, Dorn Markle. An industrial fire had ravaged eighty percent of his body. Kristin's skin fit Dr. Markle like a glove.

Billy Silk, our vegetarian computerist, appeared next. He had lost his tongue to a rare and recalcitrant form of cancer. Now he wagged Kristin's.

And then: Lisha DuPreen, who repaired gliders for a living and who had Kristin's vagina.

Maggie Yost, who wrote murder mysteries and enjoyed Kristin's ears.

Theresa Sinefinder, who ran a porpoise obedience school and profited from her stomach.

For six uninterrupted hours we sat together in Room 256, staring at the fissured plaster, studying our cobbled bodies, and wondering what to do next.

 

“My daugher was full of life,” Kristin Alcott's mother told us after we had assembled in her parlor. “Your tale is less fantastic that you might suppose.”

Merribell Alcott exuded intelligence and class. The intertwined lines on her face held the fascination of arabesque. Her voice had the pitch of wisdom. Kristin's mother dwelled among eight stray Chicago cats. And now we eight stray
memento mori
were coming home.

“When I say my daughter was full of life,” she continued, “I am stating a hard fact, and wish to be taken as literally as if I'd said, ‘My daughter was a Capricorn,' or ‘My daughter had red hair.' Perhaps you expect tears from me now—tears of joy, confusion . . . whatever. I shall not offer them. Sentimentality offends me. What's happening here is not a defeat of death but a shabby compromise with death. It's Kristin I want back, not some nebulous vibration, and Kristin will never come back. Believe me, nothing in this situation can lessen my pain, so if my needs were all that counted, I would send you on your separate ways and never let your ‘critical mass,' as you put it, form again. But, of course, the needs of another must be considered.”

Merribell guided us up the stairs, plucking cats from our path. The hallway was a musty collection of antique lamps, old clocks, and oriental rugs. As we paused outside Kristin's bedroom door, I saw that we were aligned in anatomical order: skin, ears, eye, tongue, heart, stomach, vagina, hand.

“I have not entered this place in two and a half years,” Merribell informed us. “I will not enter it today. Everything here burns me.” She vanished into a hall closet and reappeared holding a moist wad of clay. “Which of you has my daughter's hand?”

I held up Kristin's hand.

“There's a potter's wheel near her bed.”

“I know nothing about them.”

“Put the clay on the wheel head,” said Merribell impatiently. “Activate the motor. Press down. That's all. I don't expect a Greek vase, young man. Just press the clay.”

I entered the room, flexed my fingers, and began carrying out my orders. A hologram of Kristin kept watch from above the nightstand. She had an angel's face, a sibyl's smile. She looked full of life.

“Concentrate on your hand,” Merribell called to me upon hearing the motor's drone.

The wet clay sucked at my palm, oozed between my fingers, crept under my nails. My intellect found the sensation vaguely disquieting—and yet—and yet I could not deny it: my borrowed hand was glad. Its flesh tingled. Its bones rejoiced.

I returned to the hallway and spoke up for Kristin's hand. How does one articulate the gratitude of a hand? I discoursed slowly, without eloquence.

“And who has my daughter's ears?”

Stepping forward, Maggie Yost received her orders. She was to enter the sanctum and listen to a tape that Kristin had recorded live—and illegally—during a Tinker's Damn concert. Maggie disclosed her unmitigated loathing for Tinker's Damn. Merribell admonished her to let her ears decide.

“There was pleasure in my ears,” Maggie admitted afterward. “Just in my ears,” she hastened to add. “Nowhere else.”

Eyes were next. The object of their affection: a bedside poster of the film star Rainsford Spawn. When Kendra came back out, she didn't need to elaborate the romantic excitement experienced by her right eye. Its copious tears, unmatched on the left, told all.