I_Suppose_You_Do_Have_Two_Of_Them
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Stolen kidneys are supposed to be a joke. A myth, filled with bathtubs and trashbags of ice.
I should not be scouring a downtown video arcade for a stolen kidney.
This is what I get for being a geek. A gigantic, flaming dork who finds odd jobs and who thinks lab coats are dead sexy. I've worked in marine estuary research stations, I've taught science, I've wrangled 12" telescopes, and I know my way around a microscope. So of course I one day work for a museum, in which there are preserved bodily organs on public display.
Why would anyone steal a preserved fucking kidney. Freaks. I live in a world of freaks.
This is, to be honest, the busiest day we've had all year. A little bit of cynical marketing savvy has everyone in town suspecting that we'll be closing in just days, so they're all rushing the gates like Persians at Thermopylae. By day's end, we'll have cleared five thousand people. They're probably pumping in oxygen like a casino.You might as well crowd-surf to the pancreas.
Stolen. Kidney.
We have cameras for this sort of thing, but not the personnel. The guards who feel most at home right now are the second-generation punks who were born in a mosh pit. But you can't watch everyone. Not even in the final room, where you finally have a chance to talk to a med student, and touch a real, not-live organ of your very own. Gather around, touch the brain. Touch it!
But you cannot palm a brain like a shady hand of blackjack. You can palm a kidney.
The med student realized what happened within thirty seconds, but you can get down the stairs and out the door in twenty. So all I have to go on is a vague description piped to me over my cellphone, of the potential perpetrator. But the camera angle is so bad that it's only a best guess:
I am seeking a fat blonde woman wearing pink.
We hit the streets and go in separate directions. Check the trash cans, in case they dumped the damn thing. Make a mental note to scour eBay and Craigslist. And start searching MySpace, for dumbass teenagers whose first instinct is to log on and brag about popping their organ-theft cherry.
It's a goddamn kidney. It's the size of a cell phone. It fits into pockets, and I do not have x-ray vision. I am not getting paid enough for Graverobbery Recovery Expert to be part of my resume.
A video arcade. A video arcade a block away from the museum.
This is almost surreal enough to work.
I hit the shoot-em-ups, scanning the crowds for little clusters of daredevil punks. Look for the conspiratorial glances over their shoulder, the whispered secret confessions into each other's ears. Dowse for the presence of those who don't understand the consequences of their actions. Seek out those who revel in their status, as the most asinine monkeys to ever walk upright.
...I am looking for every damn teenager on earth.
A potential candidate - a near-match to the description - wanders past the Whack-A-Mole with a giggling cohort, and I follow in their wake. I hang back twenty feet or so, trying to get a gander at their hands. Is it a kidney? Or just their damn palm? It's all fleshy, dammit!
I am a grown man eyeing the hands of young women in video arcades. As my job.
Hope fades. Resignation sets in. I meet up outside with a coworker and a boss, and we rattle off tales of dead ends like a cast reunion of Vincenzo Natali's Cube. We confess the absurdity of our ways, and skulk back to the museum. We are not cut out for this type of work. No one is cut out for anything - except for this stolen fucking kidney out of somebody's body.
-
Time passes. Reward money is announced. But as days turn to weeks, the questions get boring. No, we haven't gotten the kidney back. We don't know why they took it. As a paperweight from hell, perhaps.
Two months go by.
We come into work to find an announcement in the break room: it has returned. Everyone is agog, and the details spread among the staff like a hybrid game of Operation and Telephone. The description was wrong: It was a young man, a druggie. And it was found in a terra cotta pot, in his old bedroom. At his Mom's house. Because he's a charmer.
So if you ever steal a bodily organ? Do not send cameraphone pictures to your friends. Because some people need money more than friendship with a kidney-thief.
Stolen kidneys are supposed to be a joke. A myth, filled with bathtubs and trashbags of ice.
I should not be scouring a downtown video arcade for a stolen kidney.
This is what I get for being a geek. A gigantic, flaming dork who finds odd jobs and who thinks lab coats are dead sexy. I've worked in marine estuary research stations, I've taught science, I've wrangled 12" telescopes, and I know my way around a microscope. So of course I one day work for a museum, in which there are preserved bodily organs on public display.
Why would anyone steal a preserved fucking kidney. Freaks. I live in a world of freaks.
This is, to be honest, the busiest day we've had all year. A little bit of cynical marketing savvy has everyone in town suspecting that we'll be closing in just days, so they're all rushing the gates like Persians at Thermopylae. By day's end, we'll have cleared five thousand people. They're probably pumping in oxygen like a casino.You might as well crowd-surf to the pancreas.
Stolen. Kidney.
We have cameras for this sort of thing, but not the personnel. The guards who feel most at home right now are the second-generation punks who were born in a mosh pit. But you can't watch everyone. Not even in the final room, where you finally have a chance to talk to a med student, and touch a real, not-live organ of your very own. Gather around, touch the brain. Touch it!
But you cannot palm a brain like a shady hand of blackjack. You can palm a kidney.
The med student realized what happened within thirty seconds, but you can get down the stairs and out the door in twenty. So all I have to go on is a vague description piped to me over my cellphone, of the potential perpetrator. But the camera angle is so bad that it's only a best guess:
I am seeking a fat blonde woman wearing pink.
We hit the streets and go in separate directions. Check the trash cans, in case they dumped the damn thing. Make a mental note to scour eBay and Craigslist. And start searching MySpace, for dumbass teenagers whose first instinct is to log on and brag about popping their organ-theft cherry.
It's a goddamn kidney. It's the size of a cell phone. It fits into pockets, and I do not have x-ray vision. I am not getting paid enough for Graverobbery Recovery Expert to be part of my resume.
A video arcade. A video arcade a block away from the museum.
This is almost surreal enough to work.
I hit the shoot-em-ups, scanning the crowds for little clusters of daredevil punks. Look for the conspiratorial glances over their shoulder, the whispered secret confessions into each other's ears. Dowse for the presence of those who don't understand the consequences of their actions. Seek out those who revel in their status, as the most asinine monkeys to ever walk upright.
...I am looking for every damn teenager on earth.
A potential candidate - a near-match to the description - wanders past the Whack-A-Mole with a giggling cohort, and I follow in their wake. I hang back twenty feet or so, trying to get a gander at their hands. Is it a kidney? Or just their damn palm? It's all fleshy, dammit!
I am a grown man eyeing the hands of young women in video arcades. As my job.
Hope fades. Resignation sets in. I meet up outside with a coworker and a boss, and we rattle off tales of dead ends like a cast reunion of Vincenzo Natali's Cube. We confess the absurdity of our ways, and skulk back to the museum. We are not cut out for this type of work. No one is cut out for anything - except for this stolen fucking kidney out of somebody's body.
-
Time passes. Reward money is announced. But as days turn to weeks, the questions get boring. No, we haven't gotten the kidney back. We don't know why they took it. As a paperweight from hell, perhaps.
Two months go by.
We come into work to find an announcement in the break room: it has returned. Everyone is agog, and the details spread among the staff like a hybrid game of Operation and Telephone. The description was wrong: It was a young man, a druggie. And it was found in a terra cotta pot, in his old bedroom. At his Mom's house. Because he's a charmer.
So if you ever steal a bodily organ? Do not send cameraphone pictures to your friends. Because some people need money more than friendship with a kidney-thief.