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Spare Parts

Benjamin Brindise

“The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.”

Corrie Ten Boom

    I love my mother; don’t get me wrong.
    She used to wake me up early on Christmas morning with a soft kiss on the forehead. We’d go into the living room, but before I could unwrap a present I had to shake the snow globe. A pair of Santa’s helpers took turns pushing up and down on a teeter-totter. The glass always held small orbs on the surface; the reflections from the tree lights swimming like fish. She said doing it made these times easier to remember. When I got older I found it was true.
    So yeah, I love my mother, but that was before the spill, before things got weird. Now everything’s different. It was just oil at first, but something came with it, hiding in the liquid gold.
    Mom had just retired, sixty-three and a federal pension after serving decades as the county clerk. She was ready to take care of her garden, wake up late and take in some rays. Dad died when we were still young, but better then, when we could grow to live without him.
    I remember the news reports when people started dying.
    We had a year of bullshit from the petroleum companies (always petroleum, gas or oil sounded dirty) about plugging the leak. We watched billions of dollars that couldn’t be spent funnel into each failed solution. Every CNN anchor seemed pissed, but they didn’t live on the coast and probably had some of that upper class money invested in offshore drilling.
    The whole time we watched P.E.T.A throw a shit fit for the animals. I felt bad for the dye job all the white ducks got, but as long as people were still dying of hunger and lack of healthcare my sympathies didn’t really stretch that far. I was more aligned with the spin off meaning of P.E.T.A.: People Eating Tasty Animals. Wasn’t that just life?
    It got worse as time went on.
    Hurricane season came and went carrying gallon after gallon from the Gulf of Mexico basin up onto the southern shore of the United States. Florida and Louisiana took the worst of it, seeing as they ruled the majority of the shoreline, but even Mississippi and Alabama got touched and Texas took a bit of a paintjob. Those crazy bastards loved their oil, though. I could just imagine all the ‘cowboys’ down there soaking it up with sponges, laughing and singing songs like the gold miners in ’49.
    The fires were bad. The irony was the worst part, seeing they were right next to a huge body of water, but even that had a chance of catching, creating the feared lake of fire right here on earth. New Orleans was the worst. Even a Super Bowl trophy couldn’t rebuild a city twice in six years. Morale wasn’t a word in the Cajun vocabulary anymore.
    Smoke billowed up the coast, creating a black screen between Cuba and us. At least if they wanted to finally pull the trigger on us they couldn’t really aim. It’s the only silver lining I’ve seen so far.
    It all lasted for weeks, all the people fleeing like ants from a collapsing hill. The rest of us just watched while our south burned. It went on until the rains came, most of the remaining oil evaporating and diluting with each downpour.
    But then it happened.
    Something else started to come out of the leak. You couldn’t tell at first, not even with the ariel shots they kept showing over and over again. The next thing you knew fifty-thousand people were dead, then a hundred thousand, then half a million while the month rounded out. But it stayed there, in the Gulf area, rooted down and refusing to leave. It didn’t spread like a virus might. It was territorial.
    All the scientists and intellectuals couldn’t figure out what it was, only that it was organic and wasn’t as simple as a disease. Disease’s only appeared intelligent, but following a hard-wired initiative wasn’t smart, it was just orders.
    This was something else entirely.
    The worst part was how it affected the economy. The human cost was high, but after the recession in the late 2000’s America was just starting to turn it all around, then this. Four states quarantined and one of the world’s most important water ways (the Mississippi) was useless. Half a million dead in thirty days, but countless more went unemployed, their homes and jobs gone, contaminated and decaying.
    I lost my job when a bunch of Southerners moved up North. They took less pay and that was it. I wasn’t the only one undercut, but the fact we all suffered the same didn’t make my life any easier. I ended up broke, but a new business opportunity came along.
    See a large part of the half million deaths involved people with a little red heart on their driver’s license. What this meant was organ donation, and lots of it. You may wonder how anyone considered using infected people’s organs, but after careful analysis the removed organs came back clean and ready to use.
    It only took five trials to see the infected organs didn’t work. Whatever we found buried underneath the oil hid silently in the tissue and once in the recipients body it was devastating. All five of them died within days, but even this omen was too late. The other organs had been pushed into circulation and now they couldn’t tell what was infected and what wasn’t.
    Human error they said, and a rush to make a difference. It seemed like all the problems we ended up with were human error.
    Mom hated it. She sat on her porch when I came over, drinking green tea and bitching rather then doing the gardening she’d waited decades to have time for. ‘Even-Reagan-wouldn’t-have-let-this-happen’ was her stance, but I didn’t see how it was the President’s fault. He wasn’t around for the years before when everyone was pro-off-shore-drilling.
    Honestly, though, I lost interest in politics after I heard Palin say, “drill baby, drill”. If you can’t figure out why, I don’t have much left to say.
    “Ma, I’m broke,” I told her, my eyes on the wooden boards between my feet.
    “What else is new?” She asked, sipping on her tea. She lit a cigarette and took a drag, letting the smoke come out in perfect rings. Even the old county clerk had a few tricks.
    “Nothing,” I said. She had already lent me money, but what could I do when a displaced Southerner was taking every job?
    “Well what are you going to do?” She asked with a bit of disdain. She was old, and still saw the world how it had been, not how it was. The “get-a-good-job” formula went out the window when there weren’t enough jobs to go around. The world I lived in and the one she grew up in were the same as apples and nuclear reactors.
    A black van pulled up in front of her house, the windows tinted, the hubcaps black. It didn’t look out of place like it would have a few years back. These particular vans were popping up more and more; there was another one down the street in front of The Austin’s place.
    My mom didn’t noticed; she was still too busy bitching.
    “Well, I actually heard about a new government program for people in financial trouble.”
    “Oh, you kids are all the same,” she said, looking out over her large front lawn. In her house the fridge was stocked, the cupboards full. I’d been living off three for a dollar Mac and Cheese for a year, convinced because of her that I was too good for food stamps. “Something goes wrong and someone else is supposed to bail you out.”
    “Well my only other option is to move further up North to get a job, Ma. Either that or move to Canada,” I said shuttering at the thought.
    “Maybe you should do that,” she said. “Gain some responsibility, learn to take care of yourself.”
    I’d lived on my own since seventeen because Mom couldn’t afford a full-grown boy for long after Dad died. I never moved back and this was the only time I’d really gotten in the hole. It wasn’t even really my fault. What was I supposed to do, predict a bunch of big business guys would wreck the world and leave a peon like me job-less?
    Actually, I guess I should have seen that as a possibility, but you can’t really plan with the end of the world in mind.
    “You really want me to move away, Ma?” I asked.
    Middle afternoon sun rested awkwardly between us. I wasn’t used to it. Cubicle life doesn’t provide a lot of two p.m. light in your diet, especially during the week. The manicured lawn stretched out in front of us, curbed by perfect edging and a beautiful stone divider where the grass ended and the front garden started.
    “You have to do what you have to do,” she said.
    “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I told her. I looked at my mother, her wrinkled face, her dyed black hair, the gray starting to show again at the hair line. I watched her breathe, chest rising and falling. I watched the sun soak her skin, the smoke blow out her nose, her fingers grip the mug in her hand.
    The black van waited.
    “Sorry, Ma,” I said, standing up and walking back to my car in the driveway.
    “Sorry for what?” she asked, but I didn’t turn around. I got in the car, but didn’t start it.
    The black van’s door slid open, five men in blue uniforms piling out. They didn’t wear masks or sunglasses, they didn’t need to hide. It wasn’t publicized, the things these men did, but it was public information, just like all the government grants no one applies for. They stormed the front lawn, vaulted up the porch steps and grabbed my mother.
    She yelled at first, saying who she was like it mattered. These men didn’t care. She could have been Nancy Sinatra and they still would have scooped her up, kicking and screaming back to the van. Even if it was human error there was still a rush to make things better. Once your name was on the list it was done. My mother’s name was on the list. I should know since I put it there.
    They lifted her up, the biggest guy throwing her over his shoulder. The other four formed a circle around him while he walked her to the van.
    She caught my stare when they passed, her eyes wide, her mouth open screaming obscenities at the men just doing their jobs. She punched the guys back, but he kept walking until the van door was shut behind them.
    My hands gripped the steering wheel, the knuckles white. I stopped watching and looked forward through the windshield. Days could have passed before one of the guys knocked on my passenger side window.
    I leaned over and rolled it down, tears starting to build in my eyes. I couldn’t see his face, just the buttons on his shirt and the clipboard he was holding. He tapped on the paper with a pen, each one sounding like a nail driving into a coffin.
    “Hey man,” I said, “I thought you guys were supposed to knock her out first. They said you’d do that so it wasn’t so rough.”
    “Budgetary cuts. Besides longer we keep ‘em up the fresher the harvesting is.”
    I leaned back in my seat with something trying to come up my throat.
    “Alright,” he said. “According to this she’s got a good heart, both kidneys and you okay’d the brain for stem cell research?”
    “Yeah,” I said, my mouth dry.
    “Lungs are no good right?”
    “Right,” I said, thinking about her sitting on the porch of our old ranch style house. That one was just three steps of cement, not like the wrap around we sat on earlier. She would sit there and watch the neighborhood kids and I rollerblade, puffing on her Salem Lights.
    The guy leaned forward and dropped a plastic bag packed with money on my passenger seat.
    “I know it’s not easy,” he said. “I had to have my pops picked up last week, but your mother’s going to save at least three lives and the material she’s submitting for research is invaluable. You’re doing your country a favor, remember that.”
    “Ask not, right?”
    “You got it,” he said. “Have a good day, man.”
    He slapped the top of my car and walked back to the van. The one in front of The Austin house pulled down the street. We were all doing our part, I guess.

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