Dead Man's Cell Phone Read Online Free PDF Page A

in the city, so many people, that no one person needs an umbrella, because one umbrella covers three bodies? And everyone’s yelling into their cell phones, and I’m thinking, where have all the phone booths gone? The phone booths are all dead. People are yammering into their phones and I hear fragments of lost love and hepatitis and I’m thinking, is there no privacy? Is there no dignity?
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    I get onto the subway. A tomb for people’s eyes. I believe that when people are in transit their souls are not in their bodies. It takes a couple minutes to catch up. Walking—horseback—that is the speed at which the soul can stay in the body during travel. So airports and subway stations are very similar to hell. People are vulnerable—disembodied—they’re looking around for their souls while they get a shoe shine. That’s when you bomb them. In transit. But I didn’t know that then. I was on the subway buried in some advertisement for a dermatology office, thinking about the sale of a cornea. The way I’m talking now—this is hindsight. My mind went: dermatology—cornea—rain—umbrella—Hermia’s a bitch—lobster bisque.
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    I wouldn’t really say that I sell organs for a living. I connect people—see: (Almost sung, as though Iran rhymed with bad) A man in Iran needs money real bad but he doesn’t need his own kidney. A woman in Sydney needs a new kidney but she doesn’t need her own cash.
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    I put these two together. You’re a sick person, you want to deal with red tape? You want to be put on hold—listen to bad music
on the phone for seven years while you wait for your organs to dry out—is that love? No. Is that compassion? No. I make people feel good about their new organs. I call it: compassionate obfuscation. There are parts enough to make everyone whole; it’s just that the right parts are not yet in the right bodies. We need the right man to—redistribute. One umbrella covers three bodies.
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    Truth for its own sake—I’ve never understood the concept. Morality can be measured by results: how good do you make people feel? You make them feel good? Then you’re a good man. You make people live longer? Great. Is it my job to stop executions in China? I don’t have that power. What I can do, however, is make sure that these miserable fucks who die for no good reason have a reason—I make sure their organs go to someone who needs them.
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    There was this surgeon I knew who did organ extractions in China—a highly trained surgeon—he couldn’t stand it after a while—political prisoners, not even dead yet, made him sick. Now he’s a sushi chef in New Jersey. I showed up one day at his counter. I ate his hamachi—excellent. (I don’t dip my sashimi in soy sauce. Sushi is for adults. You want to really taste your sushi, taste it. Don’t drown it in soy sauce, that’s for children.) I enjoyed my food in silence. I thanked him in Chinese. He looked a little startled. People assume he’s Japanese. I said to him in Mandarin: you don’t want people to know about your old line of work, neither do I. Left it at that. Ate my sushi. You can tell with tuna whether they slice it from the belly or from the tail end. He always gave me the belly. It’s the good part.
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    But that day—the day I died—I didn’t want to eat something that reminded me of body parts. I woke up in the morning wanting a lobster bisque. So I get off the subway, go to the café, the place
I always go. A familiar guy behind the counter, a giant, with really huge knuckles. I said, I’ll have the lobster bisque. He said, sorry we’re out, as though it was a casual, everyday thing to be out of lobster bisque on the day I was going to die, as though I could come back the following week. As though it were a friendly, careless matter—sorry, we’re