All proper jobs—at least, every job I’ve ever had—begin and end with a full accounting of the materials at hand. Though my current daily activities amount to little more than huddling in the corner of this abandoned hotel and peeking furtively out the boarded-up windows every two minutes, I figure I might as well keep to the routine. It’s sustained me so far.

My possessions:

One typewriter: an Underwood. Pale blue paint scraped down to the metal, worn from years of neglect and disuse. Found in the rear office of the hotel lobby, atop a file cabinet sporting a rats’ nest made from decades-old newspapers. The ink strip is fading but otherwise in working order, which is more than I can say for the keyboard itself. The shift key is missing, and every time I hit it, the rough shaft of exposed metal spears my finger. Any run-on sentences are unlikely to be accidental; I’m simply wary of capitalization.

Alternately, the typewriter could be drawing blood on purpose. An autonomic machine, testing for my type, preparing for the inevitable surgery to come. For all I know, it’s been stashed here by the Credit Union people as a sick joke. It’s the kind of thing they’d do. It’s the kind of thing I might have done. Perhaps there’s a camera inside. A homing beacon.

The typewriter clacks, that’s for sure, which is enough of a homing beacon in and of itself. Makes an awful racket, rat-a-tat-tat-ting away like a failing machine gun. What I wouldn’t give for the soft strokes of a keyboard and the glow from a plasma screen to brighten my lonely nights. Clack-clack, clack-clack. It’s sure to give me away, but I’m feeling saucy just now. How long this outlook will last, I can’t say. It’s not exactly up to me.

These sounds, these pages, are my sacrifice. For three months I’ve been holding down my breath, suppressing my sneezes, inhaling every cough. I move only at night, only in short, shuffling steps. This is what you do when you’re hiding. The floorboards creak. Noise is a no-no, an amateur slipup. All noises. Any noises. Call up the Appropriate Government Officials, these noises say. There’s a man hiding out in the abandoned hotel on Fourth and Tyler, these noises say. Can’t have that, no sir. The last thing I need is to have to change apartments again. What with the housing crunch, it’s getting tough to find abandoned buildings that adequately suit my elevated tastes.

This will be my typing regimen: One hour on, two hours off. This gives me a one-third chance of being detected, but I’m confident that anyone who truly cares to find me will do so without the help of the old Underwood here. They have radar, infrared, scanners beyond compare. Perhaps, if I’m lucky, those gadgets will be their undoing. No one thinks lo-tech anymore.

Let’s keep going.

Paper: Half of a rodent-chewed ream of three-hole punch, found near aforementioned filing cabinet. Gum wrappers, tossed in a pile beneath the desk. Bottles of cleaning solution, long since emptied, but the labels are easy enough to peel off and feed into the cylinder of my trusty Underwood. The varying length of pages may pose a problem, but I’ll attempt to fit my words to the medium at hand. I am nothing if not flexible.

Body: Eyes locked and loaded, full wide open. At night I have learned to sleep as the sharks in the ocean, lids propped up and attached to the top of my forehead with pilfered Scotch tape. I am ever-vigilant, the ultimate watchdog, protector of my domain, and I owe it all to the 3M Company.

Ears straining at every silent moment, so finely tuned they can pick up the cry of a dormouse amid the tide of midmorning traffic. Nostrils in a permanent state of flare, sucking up the available air, inspecting it for the slightest whiff of ether, and expelling it out again unscathed. Clean. Nothing. So far.

I need to reload my shotgun.

Weaponry, orthodox or otherwise:

A pitiful stash, I know, but it’ll have to do me. Self-defense is an expensive proposition, and my pension ran out two months ago. Even if it hadn’t, I’m sure the Credit Union has staked out my P.O. box by now—retrieving my monthly check would surely become one of my final acts, and my life, even at this stage, is worth a little more than six hundred bucks.

When I worked for the Union, I was one of the top-ranked Bio-Repo guys around. Level Five, and this is not idle bragging. This is fact. I made the jump in rank from Level Two to Level Four in just under two years, alongside my best friend and colleague Jake Freivald. It wasn’t like there was a competition—not an official one, anyway—but Jake and I kept a close eye on each others’ progress and made sure we locked our steps all the way to the top. I made Level Five two months before he did. Was I better at my job? Slightly more focused? Even a bit more talented? Let’s sure as hell hope so. My life depends on it.

Everyone’s got their favorite organs; it’s the nature of the gig. Sure, you took the pink sheets that came across your desk and worked the clients that were given to you—job’s a job, after all—but the liver was my specialty, specifically the Kenton and Taihitsu models, and I admit I took a singular delight in repossessing from the chronically inebriated. Let’s face it: Anyone who keeps knocking back the booze even after they’ve been fitted with an artiforg doesn’t deserve a whole lot of dignity in death.

One guy was so drunk when I broke into his place at three in the morning, I didn’t need to waste a milliliter of gas. He lay there, squirming around, legs kicking slightly, twisting his fleshy body in a slow horizontal mambo—nothing I couldn’t handle—and didn’t leak a peep when I started in on my business. “You havin’ fun?” I asked him halfway through. My scalpel was buried deep within his viscera. The flow of blood onto the hardwood floor was steady, but lighter than I’d expected.

“Ohhhyyyaaaaaa.”

“You ain’t gonna be drinking much anymore, are you, buddy?”

“Ohhheee hee hee hee.”

“Keep laughing,” I told him. The sensor beacon blinked away behind a tangle of tissue, and I hacked for it like an adventurer scything his way through the jungle underbrush. “You just keep laughing.”

The bloated bastard lasted a few minutes after I had his KL–418 in my hot little hands, and damned if he didn’t giggle his way to the great beyond. Thank you, Jack Daniels, you saved me a pint of ether.

I’d rather do a liver job than any other organ, though I had many good nights running out that splenetic system from Marshodyne. The latest model—the one they’ve been displaying at trade shows for a year now—supposedly comes with a built-in detaching system that actually cuts the spleen off from the host body as soon as the nonpayment sixty-day grace period is up. Jesus H. Sure, it eases up the hack work on the repo job, but it makes you wonder when the day will come when we Bio-Repo men aren’t needed anymore, when the organs will find a way to extract themselves from the deadbeats, squirm out of their host bodies, and waddle on down to the nearest supply house by themselves. I’ll be long gone by then. Probably for the best.

Thing is, the liver’s a beaut, easiest extraction in the body. Very little in the way, a clean path with remarkably little adjoining tissue. Everything else comes with problems. Jarviks are buried beneath all that bone and muscle mass, and the commission isn’t worth the grunt work and ether release. ’Course, back in the good ol’ days, I’d take any Jarvik job you could throw at me if the payoff was high enough, which is how I landed myself in this pretty mess in the first place.

Neuro-nets are—well, don’t get me started on neuro-nets. I don’t do ’em anymore, not if I can help it. I can’t extract what I can’t see, and no Ghost’s gonna tell me different. Yeah, I took the required courses during repo training, but didn’t fork over a lot of my attention. Ghost work may have the aura of respectability, and everybody’s always up for a good story about your latest Ghost trip down some poor sap’s brainstem, which makes it a lot more likely that you’ll get invited to dinner parties. But livers…livers are real, solid, tangible. I can see them, I can yank them, I can hold them. I’ve got more important things to worry about than “phantom nerves” and “virtual sensory pathways.”

Eyes and ears have too many bits and bytes and chips and things, and though I’m all for micro-extractions, I gotta admit to having been something of a slacker when it came to studying up on my nanoparts. Let’s see, what’s left…? Thyroids are ugly, stomachs are messy, bladders are puny, kidneys are child’s play. Slice down the back, a grab, a pull, and knock off for the night with a bottle of vodka for your pillow.

Basic limb prostheses are hack work, a real bore. No real nitty and only a margin of gritty. Hands, arms, fingers, legs, yawn yawn yawn. In the industry, we call ’em chain jobs. Short for chainsaw. Thing is, most of the extraction is done out-body, so you don’t even need a full repo license to work the limbs. I used to send my nephew for limb work—he’s fifteen, but the kid’s got to learn a trade somewhere, and he’s not the type for higher education. Hell, he’s not the type for lower education, either, but he’s a good little pisser and I thought it might be nice to make the repo trade sort of a family business. I couldn’t ask my son to join up. Even if I knew where he was, I couldn’t ask my son. He’d spit in my face, and I’d deserve it.

I haven’t seen him in six years. Peter, I mean. My son. The last time I saw him, we were at a Snack Shack on the west side of the city, standing near a line of customers waiting to buy potato chips and beer, and he was beating away at my chest with his frail fists. Gotta admit, it didn’t hurt, not physically, but I made a show of crying out in pain. For effect. Peter was always daunted by my physicality—dry weight I’m a good 95 kilos, nearly all muscle, whereas he’s more like his mother—delicate bones, radiant features. He’s a porcelain doll and I’m the gorilla running amok in the store. Peter looks an aristocrat in a time when aristocracy is crumbling under the weight of its own excesses. That’s Peter, I tell everyone, that’s my boy—beautiful and lonely and hopelessly out of his time.

Peter is my only son. He’s my only child at all, the offspring of my third wife, Melinda, though for the most part he grew up around my fourth and fifth wives, Carol and Wendy, who were warm enough and kind enough to treat him as if he were their own. Good kid. Don’t know how it happened, but he turned out to be a good kid. Melinda was gone from my life by Peter’s second birthday, and I’ve only seen her once since then. Once was enough, for any of us.

We shared joint custody, that’s true, but arranged the weekly transfer of our son through wholly impersonal means. Phone texts did the trick nicely for the first few years—I’d jot off a little note telling Melinda where she could pick Peter up at the end of the day, and she’d reciprocate. We’d leave the boy with friends, co-workers, anyone who’d take on the responsibility of temporary guardian and way station before one parent or the other could retrieve him.

This wasn’t my fault. At least, not at first. I would have been more than happy for Melinda to come into my home, to sit down, have some coffee, talk about our week, but Melinda wanted nothing to do with me. She preferred to have our son passed around from contact to contact as if he were a piece of microfilm in a cold war spy movie than have to converse with her ex-husband.

When Melinda filed for divorce, she wrote down only two words as her reason for seeking a dissolution of our two-year marriage: Incontrovertibly self-absorbed. Or is that three words? No matter. The question I have is: Did she mean me or her?

Here are the reasons given by my wives for each of my five divorces:

Wendy was the only tactful one among them. She could have written down any reason she chose and I wouldn’t have complained, because the truth is that I left her while our marriage was strong and steady, the greatest relationship I’d ever been in. Wendy could have taken me for everything I had left (not much), but she chose to dissolve our marriage in a no-fault state, placing the burden of blame on neither—or both—of us.

The rest of it is either lie or exaggerated truth, especially that bit about sexual non-performance. Now, there was a time…well, let’s us say that there was a point in my life when the old badger wouldn’t rise up out of his hole so quick, but non-performance is a strong word. And I never once cheated on Carol. I never once cheated on any of my wives. Carol needed a reason to divorce me from within her home state of Alabama, and adultery must have been the first thing to pop into her mind. She was always impulsive like that.

If there’s a saving grace to most of my divorces, it’s that there weren’t any kids involved. No messy custody cases, no fiery late-night battles while the boy’s in the other room with the pillow over his head wondering when Mom and Dad will finally kiss and make up.

Melinda and I, though, had Peter, and the stress of dealing with that aspect of the divorce took its toll on both of us. No doubt about it, we did a number on that kid. All we wanted to do was find a way to end something that never should have been started in the first place, but we never expected so much collateral damage.

Still, as far as I know, Peter doesn’t blame me for our treatment of him. Peter doesn’t blame me for any of his childhood traumas. Peter doesn’t blame me for avoiding his mother. Peter doesn’t blame me for our divorce. Peter doesn’t blame me for any of my trespasses against Melinda save the very last one. And I don’t blame him for blaming me.

Jake and I liked to talk about blame. About trust. About everything, I guess. We had a lot of time on our hands. We’d theorize over whether or not there was a God, and if so, what He/She might have thought of artiforgs, of addictive anti-rejection drugs like Q, of people ascribing major sports teams wins and losses to His/Her divine intervention. I can’t even claim that we were all that intellectually or spiritually curious; we were just hanging out and looking for something to chat about.

Most days, we’d roll out of bed and into work around 6 or 7 P.M., maybe catch a light dinner in the break room with some of the other guys. The back room of the Credit Union wasn’t much more than a couple of poker tables and some rickety folding chairs, bad wallpaper from ten years back that no one cared to change, and a giant chalkboard divided into a chart that detailed clients, artiforg, time overdue, and the repo man or men assigned. It was good for coffee, light conversation, and the occasional stripper party, but little else.

But it was our space, and we used it whenever we wanted. Most of the other repo guys, they didn’t have a whole lot of other choices when it came to socializing. It’s hard to make friends when everyone thinks you’re only waiting ’em out. Long-term commitment is tough, too. Out of the hundred or so repossession specialists I’ve known in my day, I’d wager that fewer than half were married, and less than a tenth of those stayed married for any length of time. I feel like I worked overtime in that department just to even the score for my comrades.

For me and Jake, being Level Five status had its perks—we got first dibs at the best jobs, respect from our fellow repo men worldwide, and a pay grade commensurate with our abilities. But it also meant we had to deal with a lot of whining and petty shit from our inferiors.

Bobby Romain, a perpetual Level Two, was good at his job and looked the part—six-two, whippet thin, never said much and always sprung for the first round—but was continually misplacing his scanner during jobs and begging us to score him a new one before the bosses found out.

Vicente Salazar somehow made it to Level Four despite the fact that he turned down more work than the rest of us could accept. He wouldn’t go into certain areas of town, refused to take jobs that required ether release. If the client’s last name started with a K or W, that was the end of that—Vicente wasn’t interested. The only reason he made it all the way up to Level Four was that when he deigned to actually work, he did it with a speed and accuracy seen in no one else except for me and Jake. Frank was supposedly thinking about promoting him to L5, but Jake and I put the kibosh on that one, quick. The guy can slack off all he wants, but you don’t get five bolts kicking back every weekend.

Then there was Tony Park, perpetual splinter under my fingernail. Tony Park was a beast of a man, 110 kilos of muscle and sinew. He had the forehead of a man twenty thousand years his senior, a wide expanse of bone and skin that seemed to climb for miles before reaching a shock of thick buzz-cut hair, shot through with dyed streaks of green. Against all Credit Union guidelines and the mores imposed by society, he’d chosen to have his Union tattoo engraved not on his neck like the rest of us, but smack in the middle of that mammoth noggin. Just above and between the eyes, blasting out a warning front and center to any and all unfortunate enough to see him coming. He’d seen something like it in a comic book and decided that if it was good enough for the funny pages, it was good enough for him.

In addition to questionable fashion sense, Tony had an unfortunately delicate temper. Despite what you might think, this is not an admirable quality amongst repo men. In this job, you’re bound to get yelled at, goaded, sometimes shot at and stabbed, and flying off the handle is rarely the best option. Tony must have missed this part of the training seminar.

As a result, Tony found himself in perpetual orbit, spinning around the L2 and L3 marks, repeatedly promoted and demoted as the years sped on. He’d pull down some big job, take down a nest or high-profile debtor, and just like that, he’d be flavor of the month, the next big thing, easy bump up to Level Three. A week later, he’d rip out some old lady’s spleen in the middle of her 110th birthday party at Denny’s, splattering blood and guts all over someone’s French Toast Slam, and hello Level Two, my old friend.

He was always on me about some favor or another. “Hey, my nephew wants in,” he’d say. “Give him a recommendation, get him in the program.”

“Get him in yourself, Tony.”

“I could, yeah,” he’d respond, “but I figure the word comes down from you, a Level Five…might mean a little something to the assholes upstairs.”

When I’d say no, he’d invariably slink away and hit Jake up for the same thing an hour later, like a kid trying to get his parents to let him go to the mall with his friends. Tony never stopped—it was his best asset and worst enemy.

As a result, Jake and I didn’t hang out in the back room as much as we used to. By eight, when most folks were just putting the kids to bed, we’d head into Frank’s office to grab pink sheets. Sometimes we’d still be working off the same assignment from the night before, but more often than not, there was new work waiting for us.

Frank is old school, through and through, and doesn’t waste time jabbering about the gig or the nature of what we do. He’s got a business to run, and he doesn’t understand why everyone has to talk about it so goddamned much. “You take all those chat shows and news reports and moralists jabbering on about the Union and put that energy into something important? Shit, we’d have jet packs and world peace by now.” That’s Frank—always thinking of his fellow man.

For whatever reason, Frank didn’t love that Jake and I hung out together as much as we did. “I respect your little friendship and all,” he’d tell us repeatedly, “but you’re my two best guys. Working the streets as a team keeps you in one place. Split up, you can cover twice the territory, get a lot more accomplished.”

“We split up all the time,” I’d tell him. “I work alone seventy, seventy-five percent of the jobs.”

“But when you partner up, it’s always the two of you. Like you’re married or something.”

Jake would scoff, “If we were married, you think we’d want to hang out with each other so much?”

Jake and my wives never got along. He always harbored resentment toward my first wife, Beth, mainly because our long-distance relationship juiced up my paranoia something fierce. The other ones were either openly antagonistic toward him, either because of the nature of our job or the nature of our relationship.

Carol (wife number four) in particular couldn’t stand the guy, and I’m pretty sure that one reason we stayed out of state was to keep me away from my best pal. Out of all of them, Wendy and Jake got along the best, even though she was the one who got me thinking about transferring over from repo to sales.

“Sales?” Jake asked when I told him one evening that I’d been considering the move. “You gotta be shitting me.”

“Wendy’s idea,” I said, “but it’s not a terrible one. I’m not getting any younger, and these fucking clients keep taking their shots. Last week I had a guy pull a goddamn bazooka on me—”

“But sales? You really think you see yourself sitting in a cubicle out in the front room?” He dropped into a clipped, high-pitched voice that he liked to do when making fun of the few salesmen we had contact with. “Mr. Johnson, we can give you this spleen at a rate that far surpasses every other corporation. You owe this to your family. You owe it to yourself.” Jake shook his head. “You might choke on your own vomit.”

“Still,” I said, “a job’s a job.”

“Fuck that. Go dig ditches, if you’re looking to get out. Go make license plates. You can’t go from repo to sales. That’s evolution in reverse. It just doesn’t work that way.”

He was right, of course. At heart, the job I was doing was the only job I was qualified for or happy to do, even if it was something that was bound to get me killed or disabled or, worse, hooked up to an artiforg. Not that that was ever going to happen.

By the time we hit the streets, Jake and I were usually two or three hours into a shift, having used up all of the remaining daylight hours with banter and the occasional beer. We’d roll through the streets, me driving and Jake shotgun, his scanner out, pinging the pedestrians and scaring the fuck out of most of them. There’s nothing like the sharp ping of a scanner to strike panic into the heart of a crowd, and it delighted Jake to no end.

“Ooh, check out Fatty,” he said, pointing to an obese man waddling down the street just in front of us. “You know his organs gave out a long time ago.”

“Wager?”

“Drinks,” he suggested. “Loser buys a round.”

The bet settled, Jake fingered the trigger on his scanner and the digital readout came back almost instantly: Kenton PK–5 kidney unit, 172 days Past Due.

“Eight days left,” Jake said, disappointed. “We should take him anyway.”

“Settle down, Hoss.” I steered the car up to the corpulent client and stuck my head out the window. “Nice night for a waddle, huh?”

The guy didn’t even look back “Fuck off.”

Rude, no? “How’s that kidney holding up?” I asked, and made sure my Union tattoo was in full view.

The guy got one look and blanched, his face draining of blood as he stumbled backward. “I—I sent the check in yesterday,” he stammered.

“You better hope you did,” I said. “Eight days, and that kidney is ours.”

It only took three seconds for the guy to spin around and hustle down the nearest alley, putting as much distance between himself and us as he could physically muster.

“Look at him go.” Jake laughed.

We pressed thumbs, as we’d done for the last ten years. “Gonna need a new heart soon as he rounds the corner.”

Jake looked at me, this strange glimmer in his eye, and for a moment, I wasn’t sure if he was going to hit me or kiss me or both.

“What?” I asked.

“Brother,” he said, “you’ll always be repo.”

There are three little girls playing in the street five stories below me. They are jumping rope and chanting this song:

If they go on, I think I will smother them.

This is the 115th day of my fugitive status. My house, my car, my belongings have all been confiscated due to mounting interest and nonpayment penalties. Fine. The house was falling apart, the car was a death trap on long-bald tires, and my belongings were of the knickknack variety, useless to all but the most ardent of flea-market bargainers. My assets, seized from all accounts, had long since dwindled to an asymptote—five alimony checks a month will see to that in a hurry. But that’s okay. I don’t need those things anymore. All I need is my trusty shotgun and cache of assorted weaponry. And maybe a few spare wits to get me through another day.

My case number, or “client designation,” as the Credit Union so gingerly puts it, is K029J66VL. I have never seen my file, despite the so-called open credit law passed more than a decade ago. Every review application I submitted to the records clerk at the Credit Union was summarily lost, destroyed, misplaced, or mishandled, and I carry around with me the stack of crocodile-tear apologies the Union passed along in lieu of the actual documents. They are beautiful works of literature which promise that the information, though temporarily waylaid, is forthcoming. So, I am told by the man shouting outside on the street corner, is Armageddon.

Note to the custodians of my nonexistent estate: On the very strong chance that I should die at the hands of a Union Repo man, and on the equally strong chance that my body has been too mangled for proper viewing and subsequent burial, I wish to be cremated along with those official Union letters. I can think of no more fitting eternity than to merge ashes with the skillful lies of those who both gave me life and hastened my death.

No one is a Bio-Repo man by birth, no matter what the commercials and billboards say. And that slogan—“Help The World Help Themselves.” Ecch. They make it sound like everyone’s born to play the part of a killer, but that’s not so. Like any other artistic endeavor, it can be learned. Some have a natural talent, of course, and some, like Tony Park, take to it a bit too easily, but there are nuances and techniques to the job that could fill the largest of instruction manuals.

But the Union persists with the “Born To Repossess” mythos. Just yesterday I caught a glimpse of a newspaper ad that read: “Learn a Trade. Join the Union. Fulfill Your Destiny!” It actually said that: Fulfill Your Destiny. They’re always preaching halfway between the spiritual and technological, a precision religion bowing at the shrine of engineering and credit. Cheesy way to snatch recruits, but it works. Caught me. Caught Jake. Caught a lot of our pals, too. Of course, the usual codicils applied: We were young, we were foolish, we were bored after a long and overproduced war effort. We needed something different. Little did we know, we’d just be getting more of the same.