From a distance the body appeared as a shadow. Just an emptiness in the night, a splotch of cold where heat couldn’t reach draped across the footpath of the park. As the two men drew nearer, the shadow gained dimension, then form, then legs and arms and an overcoat that composed a rallentando into one man’s pace and compelled him to ask, “What the fuck is that?” Although, by that point, it was perfectly clear what the fuck it was.
The men kept walking, a little slower, a little more aware of their surroundings, to the body until they were above what appeared to be an old man lying supine, head sleeping between two benches, arms crossed over his belly, legs crossed at the ankle halfway into the footpath. The pose was purposeful and would have been completely natural were the man on a grassy hill watching stars arc across the night sky. And were his eyes open. Which, they were not.
“Hey!” The first man tried to wake him. “Sir! Are you okay?”
The second man, who’d not said a word since spotting the body, glanced warily into night, into the darkness of the trees, down the footpaths, across a baseball field, behind himself, toward the street. No movement. No people. He closed his eyes and listened, but could only hear the distant, infrequent hush of traffic and his friend trying to wake the old man.
“John. John.” The second man looked down at his friend, now knelt beside the old man, pressing a hand to the old man’s shoulder. “What do we do?”
John squatted at the waist of the old man, looking him over. The old man’s clothes were not new, but they were nice and well kept. His hair was white with traces of the black it had been in his youth. His eyes closed, curved and kind. His skin loose and weathered, as it should be. He’d shaved that morning.
“Not responding?”
“Nothing. He’s not breathing.”
John placed a hand on the old man’s chest. No movement. He felt the old man’s hands. He opened the old man’s overcoat and placed a hand inside, on his chest again.
“What are you doing?”
“Cold. His hands are cold. His body is warmer. Must have died sitting on a bench and fallen over.” John felt a card in the old man’s breast pocket. He pulled it out.
“And people just fucking left him here after he fell? To be eaten by coyotes or rats or mongeese? The fuck is that?”
“Tom,” John lowered the card and looked directly at his friend, “It’s okay. Okay?”
When Tom nodded, John brought the card to eyelevel again. “And the plural of mongoose is mongooses. And there aren’t any mongooses in Santa Barbara.”
He flipped over the card. It was the size of a business card. On one side was written:
DONOR IDENTIFICATION CARD
Upon death of the donor whose name appears on the front of this card,
please call USC within 48 hours at 323-555-USC1.
In the event that no one is available to answer the telephone,
a voice message will provide instructions as to our procedure.
John flipped the card again. “Benjamin Aydin,” he read. He drew his phone from his own coat pocket and started to press numbers.
“Now what the fuck are you doing?”
“It says to call this number. I’m calling this number.” John held the card out to Tom who took it and read it.
“Feels like the first call should be to the police,” Tom said, but it was too late. John put the phone on speaker as it rang. And rang.
“Hang up. Let’s just call the cops.”
After the tenth ring, a voice interrupted: “Hello. Thank you for calling the USC Body Donation program. We appreciate you participation and apologize for not being able to answer your call. If you are calling about a recently deceased individual, our condolences, and please press 8. If you are looking for more information on our program, please visit our website.”
John pressed 8.
The voice returned: “Thank you. At this time, there is nothing more to do. Goodbye.” The call dropped.
Tom and John knelt in silence for a moment, looking at one another, until Tom realized his knees had started to hurt and he stood up.
“That’s it?”
“How would I know,” said John, standing as well.
Tom pulled his phone from a pocket. “Can we call the cops now, please?”
John shrugged, stuffed his hands into his coat pockets and looked around again. His buzz was wearing off now, nearly completely gone from the bottles of wine he and Tom had shared that evening. At least it wasn’t too cold. Even for this time of night. He ignored Tom as Tom gave information to the emergency operator and suppressed the urge to inform his friend that this wasn’t an emergency because this old man was dead. This was, in fact, whatever was the opposite of an emergency was. This was all the time in the world. This was eternity. This old man wasn’t going anywhere.
While John slid into silent considerations of death and infinity, he noticed the silence between Tom’s laconic answers. The traffic had stopped. Maybe that wasn’t abnormal. John looked at his phone. Nearly 2am. Maybe there wasn’t much traffic around here this late, but damn it seemed empty, the way a house seems empty after you move all your shit out of it and on to the next one.
John looked back at Tom who was still on the phone. From behind Tom, a man was approaching. The man wore a baseball cap, spring jacket, jeans and old sneakers. His steps were nearly silent in a way, John thought although he didn’t know why he thought it, that must have taken some practice.
“Okay. Yes, we’ll be here. Thanks,” Tom said into the phone and hung up. “They said they’d send a—” Tom stopped when John motioned with his chin over Tom’s shoulder. Tom turned to face the man. The man slowed as he approached. He came to a full stop. He looked between John and Tom, then down at the old man.
In the distance a coyote howled.
“I’ll assume one of you called,” the man in the baseball cap said, still looking at the old man.
Neither John nor Tom knew what to respond.
“This is a bit awkward,” said the man, “at this hour, you know. Not many people awake. Not sure how long it will take others to get here. I wonder if I might impose upon you two?”
The question pulled Tom back to center. “Sorry,” he said. “But who are you?”
“Oh,” said the man. He produced a card, passed it to Tom who glanced at it and passed it to John. The card was stamped with a crest identical to that on the card held by the old man.
“USC Keck School of Medicine,” John read from the card. “Anatomical Gift Program.”
“Always thought it sounded vaguely sexual,” the man grinned. “Giving someone your anatomical gift.”
The humor was lost somewhere in the dense uncertainty of the night.
John broke the resulting silence. “Impose upon us how?”
The man, still grinning, looked down at Benjamin Aydin. “My vehicle’s just the other side of the ball field.” The man bent behind Benjamin’s shoulders and took hold of his coat, lifting slowly, carefully. “I can’t carry him alone.” Tom and John hesitated, tried to look at one another without looking at one another. “I’d rather not drag him.” The man paused again for Tom and John to consider his request and to emphasize his final appeal, which pivoted cleverly from logos to pathos. “Out of respect,” he said.
Tom was the first to grab a leg. John relented after an expectant look from his friend, because what the hell else was he going to do.
The vehicle on the other side of the ball field turned out to, in fact, be an ambulance, which leant some credence to the man’s claims and made Tom and John feel a whole lot better, as they might have told friends in the future, had they been able to tell this story in the future.
“You have no idea how much I appreciate this. How many lives this will save,” the man kept saying things like that as they crossed the park and opened the back of the vehicle to lay the old man on the gurney with only minor difficulty.
“It’s really one of those moments, you know?” the man went on. “Those moments that define you, that not only indicate what kind of person you are, how you were predisposed by the chemical interactions that built you, as well as all you experienced throughout your lives and how you reacted to those experiences, but it’s also one of those moments that will, all said and done, come to dictate much of Who You Are henceforth. It’s quite magical. I’m jealous of you two in a way.”
Tom ignored nearly all of what the man in the baseball cap was saying. It made no sense and he suddenly found himself wanting another glass of that petit verdot they’d tasted earlier.
John was more concerned.
“Yeah, just—here, I’ll climb in first.” The man in the baseball cap stepped up, into the ambulance. “Yeah. Okay. Now just lift his backside. Yeah. There. Sorry, I don’t know how to work this thing.” But before long, the old man was in the rail of a bed, and the three younger men sat, each catching their breath as the man in the cap wiped his brow and refused to shut up.
“How much do you guys know about Niccolo Machiavelli?” It was more of an intro to his next topic, it seemed, than an actual question. “Gets a bad rap most of the time. Really, when you look at The Prince, Machiavelli never comments on the ‘ends’ he has in mind, but that’s not because he was immoral. The ends simply weren’t his point. He was after power. And when he wrote The Prince, at the start of the sixteenth century, not only was it to praise the Medici family, with whom he’d always had issues, but it was set during a time when there were very few legitimate rulers in the many Italian principalities of the area, and even fewer who came to their power without doing some nasty shit. And actually, when you look at the ‘ends’ Machiavelli had in mind, found in his other works, like his Discourses, they were almost always ‘good,’ or what we’d consider good nowadays. We associate anything quote-Machiavellian with unscrupulous behavior, but he wasn’t evil, he wasn’t even unethical. He had simply distilled power. How to achieve it. How to keep it. What one does with that power is another matter altogether uninteresting to old Niccolo.”
The man had begun rummaging through some drawers in the ambulance at this point, while he continued, “The only reason we consider him unscrupulous is image. We hear ‘ends justify the means,’ and we think of, what? Breaking some eggs to make an omelet and all that. We think of using people, abusing them, even killing them. Here it is.” The man pulled a syringe gun from a drawer and went about placing a certain vial into its top. “But our sensitivity to that – or our current, liberal, feminine, Christian morality, as Nietzsche might have put it – is nothing more than an instrument of mass control. Politicians who’ve gained power in the United States for the last two hundred and fifty years – not one of them adhered to soft ethics – not one of them wavered from Machiavellian strategy. Lincoln, for godsake, do you know what Lincoln said about slavery? He didn’t say it should end. He said, and I’m paraphrasing here, he said when a snake is in your child’s bed, you don’t cut off its head; you wait.” The man rested the loaded syringe gun on his leg. “Slavery was the snake, by the way. Point is, you have to seem good to the people. But a leader cannot actually be good. In Machiavelli’s terms, a prince, a pope, a leader had to seem religious – not be religious. If you want to do any Good in the world, you need power. To get power, well, you have to do some fucked up shit. Sorry,” the man sighed and smiled at John and Tom. “I’ve been talking for way to long. It’s time to just get on with things isn’t it?”
Before either of the men could answer what they were no longer sure was a question they should answer, the man in the cap injected the contents of the vial into Tom’s leg.
“What the fuck!” John fell backwards out of the ambulance, torn between flight and fight, as Tom slowly slouched to the floor.
“Yes. That’s the right reaction,” the man said. “But listen, John. It’s very important that you don’t run right now and I’m going to tell you why. I promise. But. Before I do. I want to allow you that opportunity.”
John looked across the park, back to his friend, then back to the man in the cap.
“What the fuck? Opportunity to do what?”
“To run,” the man repeated. “You won’t have answers. And I’m sure right now you’re thinking it’s the quickest way back to Melissa and your sons. They’re what? Six and eight now? It’s natural to think of them in this moment. But what I’m more interested in is certain instincts you have that aren’t natural. Running is what nearly one hundred percent of people would do in your situation. And those who wouldn’t, they’d have attacked me. But not you. You realize something. You’re ahead of all of that. You’re not reacting. You’re considering right now. You’re considering how I came up on you in the park when you’d been keenly looking around before you called the Donor Program . You’re considering why I gave that insane speech on Machiavelli. You’re considering why I incapacitated your friend when you were seated just as close. You’re wondering who else is around. You’re realizing that I’m not a serial killer for a number of reasons, not least of which is what fucking serial killer approaches two men larger than he is in a park at night. And so you’re realizing I must be part of something. And if I’m part of something, shit, it must be big. We must know your name. We must know you graduated a year early from the University of Michigan, with honors, concentration in biopsych. We must know you met Tom there. We must know you cheated on your college girlfriend with Melissa when you visited your cousin in Chicago. We must know you fantasized about having sex with your stepsister when you were in high school. We must have known where you’d be drinking tonight. We must have known your path back to your hotel. We must have known the exact timing. We must have the ability to empty a small park without anyone noticing. But you noticed, didn’t you? You noticed when the sounds of traffic abated as you were standing over Benjamin’s body. It’s what you do. You notice things. It’s how you made most of your wealth. Not with your medical practice. You’d still be in debt from that if it were your only income. No. You notice opportunities for investments. You noticed an anecdotal rise in gingivitis, researched the implications of gum disease, and invested in a company that was completing third-round clinical trials on a drug called Gloxicam, a mouthwash treatment for dementia that was announced last week. How much did you make on that, anyway? Doesn’t matter. You connect dots. You see patterns. You understand psychology. And not only that, because who cares about that. It’s like the premise of a recycled TV procedural, where next thing I’m gonna ask you to do is help be solve crimes. I’m not. It’s much more interesting than that. Because I’m focused on what you’re willing to do. The parts of you that you’ve been suppressing because you think they’re bad or evil or immoral. The parts that you hide. The parts that made you promise your best friend in sixth grade that you’d vote for him for student council if he voted for you; then you voted for yourself. And you won. By a vote. No contrition. I’m guessing you didn’t even plan to do it. It just happened in the moment, when you were writing the name for the ballot. Is the lie bad? Is it good? Or is there no ethical value attached at all? You know the answer. I know you know because you’re still here. What you don’t know, what you want to know is why it’s important that you don’t run right now. You want to know because you sense, correctly I should mention, that there’s something bigger at stake.”
Tom and the man paused there, lit in the sick florescent lamps of the ambulance, watching one another.
The silence felt sharp, as if it had claws that pulled Tom further into the night.