Weeks had passed since the dinner. I was ignoring calls from friends. When isolation overcame exhaustion, I’d take Buster out for short walks. The people passing me on the streets, the cars, the looming lampposts, the newspaper boxes with their horrific headlines—I saw everything as though from the bottom of a well. How can these people just chit-chat with each other? How does the world make any sense to them?
I finally decided to attend another church meeting. I needed to find strength and salvation, to find some way out. Before arriving, I’d built up scenarios of how I would ignore Michael if I saw him, how I would give him a perfunctory hello and behave as if nothing had happened. As it turned out, he wasn’t there, and after the meeting, a desperation seeped in. Did something happen to him? Now I needed to know he was okay, even if I thought what he was doing wasn’t.
Or was it?
Who was he hurting? Nobody. I’d played back his phone messages over and over, his apologies, his clarifications for where the meat came from, that it was lab-grown replacement organs, that they weren’t butchers. Perhaps it was my own failure, my own closed mind that was the real problem. He might have explained it all to me first, but then I’d never have gone to his home. I thought about his friends that I’d spoken to there, how intelligent they were. Eating lab meat didn’t harm any animals, and it was genetically pure. The idea did make a certain… sense, I had to admit.
After church, I rushed home and called him to accept his apology, to offer one of my own, but Michael didn’t answer.
And he didn’t return my calls.
“Five thousand dollars for peace of mind,” the med-world avatar said. I scrolled through the list of options: five grand for a liver patch, ten for whole one, twenty-five for a kidney and two hundred for a heart.
Organ replacement was a big business.
I’d done some research. Almost every time a human population faced an environmental collapse, it resorted to cannibalism as a way to rebalance: central Europe in the fifth millennium BC; the Anasazi in the 12th century; Papua New Guinea and Ukraine in the 20th century. The list went on and on as if it was a hardwired response to human-induced local ecosystem collapse. Now that local system spanned the entire planet. Human biomass would soon exceed 500 billion tons, more than any other single species, even Antarctic krill.
What am I doing? I sighed and closed my tablet. Without missing a beat, the voice in my head answered, Why not, though? It’s not like I’d hurt anyone, and nobody needed to know.
I made my decision.
I logged back on and the med-world avatar said that I needed a medical center if I wanted a delivery made. One phone call later and I’d set-up a drop-off at a local clinic with my friend Mary. I finished our call with a promise to plan an evening together soon.
Next thing, I was heading into the bathroom, wiping the inside of my mouth with a cotton swab and placing it into a double-sealed plastic bag. Moments later, I’d filled in the med-world forms and left the bag out on my balcony for a delivery drone to pick up.
It was done.
My phone rang. Michael’s number popped up. “Michael, hello! How are you?” I answered before the first ring had finished.
His face appeared on my screen. “Very good. Sorry about not calling back right away—”
“Don’t worry, I was just making sure you were okay.” I paused. “I didn’t see you at the church meetings” —another pause— “and I’m sorry about your dinner. About the way I acted.”
He took a deep breath. “That’s not why I didn’t return your calls.”
My heart was in my throat. “No?”
“No.” He wiped his face with his biological hand. “You have your own path to follow. Self-discovery is an important part of my faith.”
“That’s… well… I understand.” I wanted to tell him how much I missed our chats—how much I missed him.
“I’ve been thinking about you, Freyja. I wish you luck in finding what you’re looking for.”
It was the first time he’d ever used my full name. The tingling warmth I’d felt when I first met Michael returned. “Thank you.”
“You take care.”
With a smile, he severed the connection.
Fat snowflakes fell outside my kitchen window while jazz played inside. A real fire crackled in my old fireplace, the first time I’d used it in years. Buster was laid out at my feet as I prepared dinner. I dropped down scraps of veggies from time to time that he snapped up.
An entertainment show was playing on the wall of my living room. “… billionaire Martin Ludwig is continuing his buying spree… ” said the reporter. I glanced at the display, into glittering photoreceptors. It was the same face of the small man I’d met at Michael’s party.
I knew he’d looked familiar. Returning to preparing my dinner, the voice inside my head said, You see? Those are the kinds of people you need to surround yourself with.
Delivery of my liver patch had taken two weeks. During the wait, I’d started taking Buster for long walks, waking up early to get back on track with my gene therapy research work. I even attended a rally for ending animal farming.
Slitting open the thermal bio-containment packaging that my liver had arrived in, I removed the organ. It was cold and wet, tinged purple and reddish brown. Closing my eyes, I squeezed it, trying to see if my proprioperceptive sense would magically expand to contain this new chunk of my flesh. I waited, eyes closed. Somehow it did feel like a part of me; somehow my skin sensed this wasn’t alien flesh.
This thing was a part of me.
I dropped it into the frying pan.
An intense hunger gripped me. I was used to being hungry, but this was different. Watching my liver sizzle, I began salivating painfully. My nostrils flared. Picking up a fork, I turned it, trying to brown it evenly, but then, unable to wait, I used the side of the fork to nip off a piece and popped it into my mouth.
At first I rolled it around my tongue. Then I chewed, sucking the juices from it; I moaned as I swallowed, remembering guilt-free days of eating meat as a youth, eating and enjoying. Stabbing and ripping with the fork, I ground off another piece against the bottom of the frying pan. It was still raw. Pinpricks of blood popped from the edges of the ragged meat, but I gobbled it down.
The pan was empty before I realized what I was doing. Using the back of my hand, I wiped a streak of spittle from the side of my mouth.
Buster whined at my feet, sensing something was going on. I looked down at him.
“Not for you, little Buster, this is all for mummy.”
He always preferred human food to his own food. Human food. And for the first time in longer than I could remember, I laughed, and then another thought: You are what you eat. I laughed again.
Personal organ stockpiling was something everyone with money was doing, I’d found out. I talked about it with anyone who would listen. I was finally sleeping at night. Michael got back in touch with me, and our coffee dates became regular again.
“Sharks kill eleven humans a year on average!” I exclaimed to him one evening, startling some other customers. “Do you know how many sharks humans kill?”