I continue to stay quiet, even though I am in pain. It burns through my abdomen—a fierce, throbbing agony. I welcome it. That pain is the only thing distracting me from fear and anger and hate. If it goes away, I’ll descend into a dark swamp of emotion from which I might never escape.
Pain equals clarity.
Clarity equals survival.
Which is why I break my silence to ask the question I didn’t have the strength to utter yesterday.
“What did you do to me?”
“Dr. Wagner and I removed your left kidney and transplanted it into a needy recipient,” he says, avoiding using Greta’s name, as if I don’t already know it’s her. “It’s a common procedure. There were no complications. The recipient’s body is responding well to the organ, which is excellent. The older the patient, the more common it is for their body to reject a transplanted organ.”
I muster the strength to ask another question. “Why did you do it?”
Nick gives me a curious look, as if no one has ever asked him that before. I wonder how many people in this same predicament have squandered that opportunity.
“Under normal circumstances, we prefer that donors know as little as possible. It’s better that way. But since these aren’t normal circumstances, I see no harm in trying to clear up some of your misconceptions.”
He hisses the word with clear distaste. As if it’s my fault that he’s being forced to say it.
“In 1918, the Spanish flu came out of nowhere, killing more than fifty million people worldwide,” he says. “To put that in perspective, the Great War going on at the same time killed almost seventeen million. Right here in America, more than half a million people died. As a doctor, Thomas Bartholomew was on the front lines of this particular war. He saw it strike down friends, associates, even family members. The flu didn’t discriminate. It was ruthless. It didn’t care if you were rich or poor.”
I remember that horrible picture I saw. The dead servants lined up on the street. The blankets over their corpses. The dirty soles of their feet.
“What Thomas Bartholomew couldn’t understand was how a millionaire could succumb to the flu as easily as a piece of tenement trash. Shouldn’t the wealthy, by virtue of their superior breeding, be less susceptible than people who have nothing, come from nothing, are nothing? He decided his destiny was to build a facility where important people could live in comfort and splendor while he kept them safe from many of the ailments that afflicted the common class. That’s how the Bartholomew was born. This building was willed into existence by my great-grandfather.”
A memory forces its way into my pain- and drug-clouded mind. Nick and me in his dining room, talking over pizza and beer.
I come from a long line of surgeons, beginning with my great-grandfather.
Another memory quickly follows. The two of us in his kitchen, having my blood pressure checked, Nick distracting me with small talk. After I told him the story behind my name, he shared the obvious fact that Nick was short for Nicholas. What he didn’t tell me—not then, not ever—was his last name.
Now I know it.
Bartholomew.
“My great-grandfather’s dream didn’t last very long,” Nick says. “His first task was to find a way to protect the residents in case the Spanish flu ever flared up again. But things went very wrong, very quickly. Some of the same people he was trying to protect got sick. Some even died.”
He doesn’t mention the dead servants. He doesn’t need to. I know what they were.
Test subjects.
The unwilling participants in a mad doctor’s experiment. Infect the poor to heal the rich. Clearly, it didn’t go as planned.
“When it looked like the police might get involved, my great-grandfather felt he had no choice but to end the investigation before it could even begin,” Nick says. “He took his life. But an ouroboros never dies. It’s simply reborn. So when my grandfather left medical school, he chose to continue his father’s work. He was more careful, of course. More discreet. He shifted the focus away from virology to prolonging life. With wealth comes power. Power earns you importance. And the truly important people in the world deserve to live longer lives than those who are beneath them. That’s especially true as we face another epidemic.”
Telling his tale has left Nick energized. Beads of moisture shine along his hairline. Behind his glasses, his eyes gleam. No longer content to sit, he gets