Empty Insides

On the fifth of march, as the late snow was crying from the sky into the suburbs of Tulip's Hollow, Michael Phillips woke up to discover that his liver had been stolen. His memory was a haze, a gap of black time where the organ had been harvested, subcutaneous skin unlocked with scalpel. He had risen, felt the freshly stapled scar over his frontal abdomen, and called the police.

He was at the hospital shortly afterwards, where the doctors, police, and Michael worried over the nature of the crime. It was only when scans had finished and tools readied to assess the damage that the professionals discovered the truth.

Not only had Michael's liver been taken, but in its place was a new one. A wrong one. The liver that they found there was leaky, discolored and damaged from years of abuse by drug and alcohol. Medical staff were horrified to discover that lesions of late stage cancer pocketed its surface, the lumpy wads of disease visible to even the untrained eye.

The sick liver had matched his blood type: it had bonded to him, and in doing so, had poisoned him completely. In a later biopsy of his lymph nodes, they discovered that the cancer had propagated in the window that he was comatose. Chemotherapy was deemed impossible. Even if they were to replace it with a completely clean organ, the chemical treatment on top of the cancer would kill him.

Michael Phillips was doomed.

At first, police were baffled. Why harvest his organs in particular, and why replace them at all? Why him? He was an unlikely victim for the circumstances presented, a mid-level manager who rarely left his upscale neighborhood was not the person you expected to have pieces of their bodies removed. Let alone replaced with failing, cancerous substitutes. Before his death, Michael had no memory of meeting any strange individuals, nor did he recall any unusual behavior that deviated from his norm. He had gone home, lay down in his bed, and woken three days later with terminal illness transplanted inside him. The window for the crime was large, so large that it had baffled the police department as HOA mothers and retirees rang the phone off the line to ramble fearfully.

Though it frustrated the police, the citizens had been right to be afraid. Not even a month after the crime, a man had woken to discover his kidney missing, replaced with an unknown donor that triggered renal failure hours later. He had not survived.

More followed. A heart taken and replaced with a murmuring defect. A lung taken and a fluid-filling sack returned. Not organ theft, but organ terrorism. In each case, the replacements were unusable; in any hospital, even a quack show, they would never have been for anything other than medical waste. From the suturing and stapling on the victims, forensic analysis pointed to it being from one source. There was a mad doctor on the loose.

A mad doctor that detective Jacob Mayfair had to find. Four months into the case, and there was nothing but dead ends. The medical community in Tulip's Hollow was robust as far as small towns went, due in part to the sheer number of upper class baby boomers that had come back to roost in a sleepy tourist trap. Such a populace, along with the oddity of the crime, had set the 24 hour news cycle on fire, and even now, a third of the year later; the case was discussed among pundits and message boards with intensity.

Jacob Mayfair was not a very good detective. At least, he himself didn’t think so. He could solve crime, yes, but found no real engagement with it. The cold distance that he naturally gravitated towards made him, in many ways, a model detective, but he lacked the ability to understand motive and emotion that the best usually had. Rather than embrace that emptiness, Jacob found himself doing what he always did when he felt dissociative: throwing himself at situations to remind him how human everything was.

Tulip Hollow’s Food Bank was holding a massive breakfast event, and volunteers were thin when he walked in that morning. One sign up sheet later and he was handing out takeaway containers of pancakes with the best of them. The disparate faces of the unfortunate helped to ground him. There were mothers with children, faces old and young alike, the coin flip of fortune tailward for them all. He felt guilt when they saw his badge and shied away, afraid of the violence authority brought.

“Yeah, you hear that they’re raiding the encampments again?” He heard from a couple lines down. “Another data center, or a festival or something. At this point, not like they need a reason.”

A voice answered, one of the organizers. “It’ll be alright, we can find some space for the displaced later on today.”

He knew about the raids, the officials kept them keyed in so that no one out of uniform got caught in the crossfire. It was a festival, some music event for the stars of yesterday. The conversation faded as he handed out the next meal. “Thank you son. Don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s nice to see that you aren't-uh…”

He studied the man in front of him. An older black man with salt and pepper beard, dressed light in the late summer. He looked more like someone's grandfather than homeless, but Jacob knew better. Sweat stained his collar as he searched for the word to use.

“On the job?” Jacob gave him an out.

“Y-yeah.” The stutter told him that he was on some particularly hard times. He had an urge to connect with him.

“So what do you get up to in this town?” He continued handing out meals while they talked about small things. It was obvious he was being held at arms length, Jacob didn’t know if it was drugs or just the discomfort of a police officer, but he wasn’t going to push it. Rain was coming soon, the goings on of local politics, places shutting down. It felt nice, like he was finally recovering from whatever ennui was infesting his soul.

Then he heard the cough. At one of the fold out tables in the echoing hall, a woman, old, chain-smoker, coughed hard. Not a normal cough. He felt it, somewhere in his own lungs, his body telling him that the sound was wrong. The conversation cut off as he stared at her. The case was suddenly on his mind.

“Officer?” The older fellow was trying to engage when he pointed at her.

“Do you know that woman?”

He shook his head. “I haven’t seen her around, no, but people drift in and out…”

Jacob moved over. The woman was mid-bite, syrup on her chin when he tapped her shoulder. “Ma’am?”

“Whatcha want?” She spoke with a slight slur, a couple teeth missing in her mouth. He heard steps from behind.

The organizer from before was close now, hawkish as she watched him, phone in her hand. “Is there a problem officer?” She spoke flatly. Faces had turned, attention was on them from all around. Fear. He felt like a piece of shit, but his hunch came first.

“No, no problem. I’m pursuing a case. Ma’am, would you be okay helping me answer some questions?” He turned his attention to the woman. She choked slightly on the pancake, the wrong cough slipping out again.

“Maybe…” She was scared of him, plain as day as she failed to meet his eyes.

“I’d like to talk in private, but-” He turned over to the organizer. “It concerns you as well I think. May we-?” He motioned to the back rooms. They needed no more convincing, the strength in numbers important when facing authority. He wasn’t going to do anything untoward, but he couldn’t blame their concern.

The organizer still had her phone out when he shut the door to the pantry space. “How long have you been in Tulip’s Hollow?” He started. The organizer whispered something to her, assurances that she didn’t need to say anything if she didn’t want to.

“It’s fine hon. Thank you.” She brushed her off and answered. “Just a couple days. Some officers from Hamilton-" He knew the neighboring town by name alone, “-they dropped me off here.”

“Why?” He knew why, but he was hoping to hear her confirm.

“I dunno…it's just what they do. They get tired of seeing the same faces on the streets, putting names to us, so they shuffle us around. I don’t remember where I was from originally…” She crossed her arms and looked away with discomfort, the rasp of her throat hitting his ears with sorrow.

“Have you changed clothes recently? Showered?” She shook her head no.

The organizer had dropped her phone, but was still scrutinizing Jacob. “What’s this about?”

He paused, thinking. “Ma’am? Have you had difficulty breathing these last couple days, or maybe blacked out unexpectedly?” She didn’t answer. In the dark of the pantry, the voices outside were a low rumble. The organizer’s concern shifted, confusion replacing the hesitancy. He continued, “Could you lift your shirt for us?”

“Hey, no, I draw the line there-” The food bank worker went to speak when she was cut off by the smoker.

“Don’t speak for me!” She snapped, then stifled a cough. “Don’t.” Silence followed for a moment, then she did as was asked. A sinking feeling filled Jacob to his shoes as he watched the scar be revealed. It was just as the others, a perfect sutured valley that cut through her chest, just where the lungs would sit below the ribs. The organizer took a sharp intake.

“How long have you had that? Two weeks?” He answered for her, and she shook her head yes. “Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“And say what?” She shrugged, shaking now. “I didn’t want them to take it.”

A spark hit his spine like fire. “Take it?”

Then she started to cry, an ugly, horrible weeping. “It-they told me I had months left…” The tears ran down her aging face, the lines like rivers in drought-stricken fields. The desire to ask questions was suddenly lost to him. He was reminded of his mom, her last moments on earth when he was away from her.

When the organizer hugged her close, filling the gap, it was a horrible emptying of his soul again. He felt the shadow of the hug on his arms and chest, a hollow as he realized he was standing stock still. He shook out of it, biting his tongue to put him back in the moment.

“Take it?” he confirmed to himself. “You said you had months? Something wrong with your lungs?”

“I don’t know who it was…” She whispered, drool dripping over her anguish. “I just woke up and the pain was almost gone…I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know…”

A second chance, at the expense of someone else. A vision formed in his mind. Who to look for, what he would find there. Jacob left the room, the faces of the destitute following him out the door as he called in the investigators.

A mystery had been solved, in its wake creating a new one. The old, broken organs had replaced the functional, but where had they gone? Detectives had DNA tested the material where they could of course, but there was little information to be found there, and now they knew why. The people who had slipped through the cracks, who avoided the system where they could were the recipients of the transplants, and all of them were people destined for oblivion; now making recoveries.

A legal nightmare, in every sense. Were they supposed to rip the stolen organs out of the homeless, and return them to the people who “mattered”? Some had already lawyer-ed up, but even those willing to return what was taken ran into the issues of the procedure, the costs, the need for another replacement on top of them. Doctors couldn’t just “return” sick organs to someone, even if they were theirs originally.

As the case thickened like blood, Jacob found himself digging through records. Not of medical personnel per say, but something different. It yielded quick results.

He found them in Lewisburg, two towns over. They were at a free clinic, treating the poor. “May I talk to you?” He first spoke to them mid-prescription.

Simon Hillock and Jacob sat across from each other at the cafe, the blond man ordering for them both, a breakfast unique to the location called an "Omelette roll”. The fluffy eggs, bread, and mushrooms on any other day and in any other place would taste amazing, but here? They were ashen upon the tongue.

“You found me quite quickly after this latest breakthrough.” Simon said, sipping his coffee.

He crossed his arms on the table. “The victims. It was an easy connection to follow. Health insurance broker. Pipeline worker-”

“Retired government clerk.” He finished the metaphor for him. “Did you not find that one yet?”

They hadn’t. He didn’t tell him that though. “You won’t run?”

He laughed. The sound was so genuine in the sunny afternoon that it almost made him forget why they were there. “No. I did enough good for one life I suppose.” The casual nature of the words made him shake his head.

“Good? How on God’s earth can you call what you did good?!” His bafflement overpowered the anger.

Simon smiled wider. “When you work with the poor and the sick for as long as I have: do you know what’s the real soul killer to see?” He sat back in the chair, the sun over his eyelids. “How little people truly care about their part in things. It’s ironic, but it’s the average person who perpetrates...this." He threw a hand, gesturing to everyone around him. "The people who just...clock in and out, and lie to themselves about what they're doing.”

He bit into his roll, swallowing as he continued, “Construction workers, office workers, it's all the same. “I’m not doing evil. I’m just doing my job. I’m signing papers. I'm nailing boards. I’m just living my life within my means. How could I cause so much misery just doing that? How is this my fault?” He leaned in, and Jacob felt his guts squirm. "Do you know what I mean? Out of sight-”

Somewhere, in the town he was told he was protecting, while they sat here drinking coffee, hundreds were being displaced. The encampments in Tulip’s Hollow were burning, the cardboard and tents set to fire so that the people who ultimately put them there could enjoy their rewards for doing so. The distance felt vast, and close all at the same time. Was it the same for the people in those suburbs, holding cookouts, playing with their kids? Did they feel this? Did they lament?

“-You get the picture.” Simon’s smile fell. “All those poor, powerless people while these ignorant fucks stood aside and ruined them, poisoned them day after day with their bad decisions. I just couldn’t stand it any more.” He looked to the floor. “It drove me crazy.”

Jacob didn’t engage. “Did you have accomplices? Anyone from your volunteer days overseas?”

He shook his head. “No. I acted alone, and never with consent.”

“So then how do you justify it? If they don’t get a choice in this either?”

He held his hands wide. “That’s life! Karma’s a joke and a bitch. No one who deserves punishment ever feels it. No one who’s earned a second chance is given one. Why should I care when nothing else does?”

A police car arrived. Two officers stepped out, looking uncomfortable as they scanned the crowd at the cafe. People were laughing, their day ahead of them bright.

“Strange isn’t it?” Simon paid the tip, a hefty amount that exceeded their purchase. He looked around, distaste writ across him. “Everyone here, everything they have. It all came about from their own evil. Slave labor and foreign blood. Someone has to be on the bottom rung, taking in all the poison. So long as it isn't you, what does it matter?”

Jacob didn’t get up. He sat, hands clasped. “I’m sorry.”

Simon frowned. “Why?”

“They didn’t need to die. Your friends overseas. I read your file, the drone strike.”

They were silent. The officers approached. Jacob warded them off as their eyes met. The sadness there was so deep that it could fill an ocean.

“You care more than anyone here." He felt like he was shouting over the rolling sea. "The only way to do good in this world now is to do evil. Remember that, detective Mayfair. Because we’ve all made it that way. Each and every time we look away. Each and every time we sign a paper. Each and every time we tell ourselves, “I’m not like that.” None of us are immune to it. It’s in all of us now. In everything.”

He shook his head. "They were desperate too, Simon. Average people don't live, we just survive. If you'd become close to them, you would know that. Instead, you punished them." He finished his coffee.

"Are you close to them, detective?" He had no response, the ache in his heart plain on his face.

He shrugged. "One day we'll have to pay the price for our poisonous hearts."

They shook hands. Jacob felt the warmth there, the sorrow. The regret. A human feeling. Simon was led away, some patrons looking over confusedly as the blond medic was put into the car, the slam of the door final.

As he was driven off, Jacob Mayfair stared up at the summer sky, thinking of the food bank, of what he would do with his life next.