Bonnie was quiet after I finished telling my story, and I let her sit and think. She leaned back against a pile of generic heart replacements, her eyes closed. I didn’t know if she was planning on running out of the warehouse or if she was just formulating the right words to tell me how low I’d sunk, but I sat there and waited for it. Watched her lips part, the tongue come out and wet them with artificial saliva, disappear back into her mouth.

In time, she sat upright again. “Afterward…? You didn’t take any more jobs?”

She wanted me to go on with the tale. I was glad to oblige, relieved to be momentarily free of reprisal. “I tried, I guess. Lied about Melinda, said I couldn’t find her, and Frank kept handing the clients down to me, but as soon as I left the office, my finger would start shaking. Once I got in my car, the hand would get going, and soon it was my whole body. By the time I got to the client’s house, I was a walking earthquake, vibrating up and down my spine. No way I could go inside. As soon as I drove away, got off the block, it got better, smoothed out, and I could move and breathe and talk again. Whiskey helped. For that first month, I ended up taking the jobs and outsourcing them to Jake or another Bio-Repo, just to cover up my problem, but I wasn’t getting much of a commission that way. Ten percent, tops, for the finder’s fee. I wasn’t making ends meet.

“The final straw came when I decided I was going to go through with a repo, just to get me over the hump. Shrink talk, right? Carol’s therapist would have loved it. If I could get through one simple repossession, I figured, the rest would fall into place and the shakes would stop. It was an easy case, a factory owner who’d been known for mistreating his workers all throughout his professional life, and I guessed it wouldn’t be too hard to repo a liver from a guy brimming over with evil.

“Got to his workshop around four, and by four fifteen, I’d only made it up to the door. My pack was rumbling around on my shoulders, the ether canisters slamming into each other, and I was barely able to hold the scanner in place long enough to get a good ping. By four thirty, I’d managed to bore a hole in the window for the ether tube, and by five—thirty minutes longer than it ever took me before—I was standing over the client, ready to do what I had always, always done.

“I didn’t black out until I dug in with my scalpel, but by then, it was much too late.”

They threw me a going-away party. Jake and Frank and the rest of the crew gathered around, lit candles, and gave me artiforg credits to put toward my Jarvik or, should I ever need it, another implantation. If any more grand mals came my way, it was a likely scenario. “Better than a watch,” I joked.

Jake took me out for drinks afterward, hauling me down to the same bar where we’d first gotten a glimpse of that Union employment flyer. It hadn’t changed a wink in the intervening years, except for the owner and bartender. The old man had been replaced by his son, who didn’t know us or care about our makeshift reunion. He still overcharged and watered down the drinks.

“You need anything?” Jake asked.

“I’m all right,” I lied. “I’ve got investments.”

“Sure,” he nodded. “Don’t we all.” Bio-Repo men are not known to be fiscally shrewd. “If you ever do need anything, you give me a call. Day or night.” And he gave me a card. Just like that, I was on his give a call list. I’d known his number by heart for ten years, and there he was handing me a business card.

Dumbfounded, I took it, thanked him. We drank in silence. There wasn’t much to say, us two. We’d been through school, through the war together, the training program; he’d been part of my life for nearly all my life, and though I knew that, while on the surface, we were still as close as we would ever be, something had fundamentally changed between us.

“Well,” he burped after our second, wordless beer together, “I’ve got clients to get to.”

“Gas, grab, and go,” I said, trying to sound chipper.

Jake laughed, a little sadly I like to think, and slapped me on the back. We pressed thumbs and hugged, friends who knew it would be a long time before we saw each other again, and he threw some bills on the counter and walked out of the bar.

I still have his business card in my pocket.

Another day gone, the typing regimen slowed to a crawl. The Underwood doesn’t react well in the midst of all this high technology. Ashamed, perhaps, of its hammer and ink, clicking and clacking. And the tight confines that were once so comforting to me have become stifling. Cramped.

Bonnie and I have fallen into a comfortable pattern, an easy way of living our attempt at life. We talk, we eat, we drink, we make love. Late at night, after everything is closed up and the automatic timer turns out the warehouse lights, I lie down on our shelf with my head pressed against her abdomen, and I fall asleep to the tune of her artiforgs whooshing and clicking in beautiful, sonorous symphony.

Tomorrow, we are going back to see the Outsider; by now, Asbury should have found another place for us to hole up. After that, we’ve decided, it will be up to us to find a way out of the city, out of the country if possible. Airport personnel won’t be looking for us unless the Union’s initiated one of their biweekly hunts for the Big Hundred, and we should be able to make it safe and sound if we can get our hands on a scanning jammer and some forged documents. Asbury can help on that end, I’m sure; Outsiders have friends in all the darker walks of life.

And then, we’re off. To…I don’t know. South America? Myanmar? Does it matter?

They talk about an island somewhere in the South Seas that hasn’t found the modern age yet, a primitive land where they still practice open-heart surgery and put people on gargantuan dialysis machines. If it is true, we’ll find it soon enough. Change our names, our faces, settle down, start a family, run a shop selling trinkets to tourists on the beach. Live hard until the rest of us dies, happy and whole.

I know full well that this is the kind of thinking that gets you killed. Then on with it, already, I say. On with it.

Wendy and I had dreams, once upon a healthier time. We had hopes and aspirations, and despite my age, plans for children of our own. Peter was nearly grown by the year I married my fifth ex-wife, and it was time to bring some more rug rats into the fold.

We met at a funeral, just after the casket was lowered into the ground. I was there as the dead man’s former employee; Wendy was there as his daughter. Her father had been my boss’s boss at the Union, and though Wendy and I had never met, I’d heard stories of her youth, beauty, and brains countless times from the old man.

I was going left, she was going right, and we collided beneath an overgrown banyan tree, dripping with moisture from that morning’s rain. I apologized, she apologized, and we ended up sipping coffee and eating Danish together at the gathering afterward before either of us realized our relationship to the deceased.

She treated Peter like a special gift, a beautiful young man whom she could shower with love and affection, and it hurt her almost as bad as it hurt me when he stopped coming around, stopped calling, stopped having any contact with his father. It wasn’t much longer after then that I went on the run, signing my divorce papers from within the confines of the same seedy Midwestern motel in which I’d found the Flying Moellering Brothers. It was comfortable for some reason, fitting, and I hunkered down there for a week before leaving to search out new digs.

I could call Wendy now, I suppose, and she’d take me back. She’d hole me up, if I asked, penalties notwithstanding. And when they came to take my heart away, she’d throw herself in front of the Bio-Repo man’s scalpel in order to save my life. She’d sacrifice herself for me, and I don’t think I could do the same for her. I don’t think I could do the same for any of them.

They all sacrificed for me, in a way:

I see it now, a bit of a smudge on what had once been a clear picture of my ex-wives. I’d had it all figured out, had all five of them drawn so nicely in long, broad caricature, and now this realization has come along and filled in the lines for me, forcing me to see color in a world that used to be so perfectly black-and-white. The more I think about it, the sleepier I get. I should stop thinking. I should stop typing.

We’ve moved. Too tired to explain. Bonnie is alive. I am, too. For now, this is enough. It’s more than I could hope for.

Two hours from now, I expect to be dead. This will be a voluntary decision on my part, a decision made after a long day’s thought, and one which I will embrace willingly. This will not involve anyone else, and should go a long way toward righting what has been wrong. Two hours from now, I will walk into the Credit Union offices, approach my best and oldest friend Jake Freivald, and bare my chest for his talented scalpel. What happens after that is none of my business.