Macky Cruz

Macky Cruz

Metro Tarak Organ Scouts

This was the century of strangely specific talents, sure, but nobody went around looking for whatever Restituta Manalo had going for her. Restituta, known as “Bok” to Kap, and all of Metro Tarak, had a face you would expect absolutely nothing from––a daft but well-intentioned construction-worker kind of face. But not so rough that you would not let her near children. If anything, she was a hit with the kids.

They knew she spoke organ.

Kap, on the other hand, had no patience for anything that got in the way of the good life. Today, in the unlisted auctions at PartsCon, that would be the organ ops middlemen, and Bok’s ghetto inclinations. Kap had just diverted Bok away from pocketing the fifth cell-cultured goat milk soap sample from the dermatech section of the bustling main exhibition hall. They were running late for the auction keynote.

“Who-ooo-hwoo. Who-ooo-hwoo,” Bok said, clutching and opening her fists. She was wearing a laboratory coat because it was the only thing remotely up to code she had. Kap hated it at first, but warmed up to the idea of introducing Bok as her lab manager for added gravitas. “Loud lungs,” Bok said, pointing at an elderly man.

Kap ignored Bok’s observation. She wanted to fully appreciate the disparity between where they were and where they came from, having spent the morning helping one of the village dogs give birth to eight puppies back at Metro Tarak. Bok and Kap had seriously considered preserving the puppy placenta the bitch refused to lick and selling it to the monied but witless hardcore, and so, of course, that is exactly what they did.

“Look at us, on a floating villa! Gently caressing the stratosphere’s ass,” Kap said, gesturing wildly to the skylit domed ceiling and pronouncing “stratosphere” extra loud. But Bok had by then made her way to the line of people waiting to play with a nanotech insta-diagnostic prototype at the auction pavilion entrance. Kap watched Bok study what the other people ahead of her were doing so she could mimic them, then pulled her from the throng before she could.

A NO PHONES sign boasted that the pavilion was “fully cloaked against satellites and cellular networks.” Inside the auction hall, fifty smart tables shimmered––intermittently glowing and dimming in response to the presenter’s gestures. Rich brown leather seats squeaked as they molded to sitters’ comfort preferences, and holographic numbered buttons bloomed from the tables like geometric flowers.

Bok’s rebellious seething at being separated from merch persisted as they made their way to seats close to the entrance scanner. Their tablemates, other organ agents in mall-bought suits carrying self-important folios, glanced at Bok without moving their heads. Kap slammed her leg against Bok’s to make her stop grumbling. Sitting near the stage were some of the most famous figures in the body mod and organ replacement industries. Leon Pureza, a tall, kind-looking doctor known for transplanting second hearts, was showing a time-lapse video of nanobots scraping arterial plaque from a patient’s clogged carotid.

Kap was mesmerized until she looked back at Bok, who had nearly finished drawing an anatomically correct kidney using a marker from the box in the middle of their table labeled “Auction considered final––official pens.” Kap flung a napkin over the kidney drawing, but not fast enough. A few of the agents beside them were wide-eyed with judgment. The only reason Kap brought Bok was because she had an automatic plus one, and because they were serving white-truffle-butter-infused wagyu beef, polluted as hell––as was almost everything in the central countries––but delicious. Bok did not like eating meat because it was like eating a cousin, which only meant more for Kap.

“Are you a fucking child?” Kap asked. It was an insult she had had to explain several times in the past. But Bok seemed to understand now that she was embarrassing them. Bok tried to rub off the kidney, realized she couldn’t, then spat on the table in what she thought was a discreet manner, until she looked up and saw disgust, confusion, and horror on their tablemates’ faces. Then went back to rubbing.

Eventually, Bok glanced over at Kap, whose face had gone from red to white, while unable to articulate anything. The stage now in her line of sight, Bok stopped rubbing, and listened.

Kap relaxed for a good few minutes until she saw Bok had left her seat.

“You’re kind of pregnant,” a voice from a mic in the aisle interrupted Pureza’s demonstration of the insta-diagnostic prototype on a frazzled-looking young lady. It took all of Kap’s strength to turn to see who had spoken, even if she already knew it was Bok.

Pureza gasped at the lady on stage with him. “You signed a waiver. This is experimental technology.”

“Not the lady,” Bok said. “Lady’s just clogged.” She made a tiny circle with her index finger and thumb.

Pureza froze and ping-ponged from Bok, to his tablet, to the lady, and back to Bok. Pureza whispered to an usher who escorted Bok back to her seat. Pureza gathered his bearings and returned to his talk with, “I don’t know if that was a wild guess or some crazy parlor trick, but that’s accurate. This lady here is a notorious gallstone-former, one-centimeter buggers!”

The lady clapped shyly but stopped when she realized what Pureza had said.

People gasped and turned to catch a glimpse of Bok’s face, but she was already back at the table, rubbing the kidney away again. Kap, who by now had cycled through all known emotions, quickly turned entrepreneurial. “It’s our… years of experience,” she said.

At the break, Kap pulled Bok over as a hub of curious bidders formed around them. “Yes, we are from Metro Tarak, one of the most pristine and remote areas in Sector Fifty-six,” Kap said.

The rest of the group nodded excitedly. “Are there many viables in Metro Tarak?”

“Many, too many,” Kap boasted. “And I charge a quarter of what that scammer does,” she whispered, shielding her pointing finger with a hand. Then, loudly, she said, “Hello, Mr. Tan.” Mr. Tan did not know, or at least pretended to not know Kap. He looked through her blankly and resumed talking to his own circle of better-dressed clients.

A loud but soothing voice interrupted the hob-knobbing. It said hello in too many languages, then, “If you may all please take your seats, we are about to begin the priority draws.” The low purr made “begin the priority draws” sound like “erotic audio massage.”

Satisfied with her networking, Kap beelined to the free cupcake area, then returned to her seat before realizing that Bok was gone again. She found her on the mezzanine of the cavernous hall, where the modding community spilled and tripped over one another at booths and stalls talking organ swaps. Bok waved to her.

“You know what could significantly shorten my project timeline?” Pureza was asking her. “An organ reader. Sector Fifty-six is changing. Nano this, nano that. What a time to be alive! I’m not interested in the next sugar magnate who wants a twenty-year-old’s small intestines, I’m interested in growing organs.”

Bok’s eyes lit up while Kap’s dimmed. Kap didn’t come here to discover her livelihood––for which she had just printed out legit-looking company logo patches––was about to become obsolete.

“Organoid technology is gearing up to be really big, but we have much to learn, and I’m sure there may be unforeseen complications,” Pureza said.

“Like rejection?” Kap suggested.

“Graft acceptance is pretty stable now thanks to nano,” Pureza said. “The real game is in knowing an organ needs replacement way before symptoms appear.” He turned to Bok. “Which is where people like you come in. With what you did back there, I’m sure you’ve learned to recognize patterns that tell you whether someone is a viable donor or whether they’re in the early stages of disease.”

Between the two of them, it was only Bok who could tell by sensing. Kap was just the marketer, the medicalese expert, the sense-maker. If Pureza knew what Bok could do and took her away, Kap didn’t know how long she’d last running expensive diagnostics for each and every client. There’d be paperwork, annoying interviews, week-long monitoring during which, at some point, a donor might get cold feet.

“I can do weekends,” Bok said, which sounded like an answer to a question Kap wasn’t there to hear.

An usher signaled to Pureza to come back for the auction. He handed out his cards and gave them a two thumbs up, both on one hand, and winked. Bok looked utterly delighted.

Kap felt slighted. She knew she didn’t own Bok, not really, but Bok had never, in their years together, ever indicated that she wanted more. Kap wasn’t sure whether it was possessiveness or jealousy that had sucker-punched her, but whatever it was, it set Bok in an interesting new light.

The new light was fleeting at best though. Upon peeking in Bok’s bag going home, Kap saw she’d swiped not only about a kilo of goat milk soap, styluses from the smart tables, and about three handfuls of butter pats, but also a free-standing replica of the human appendix.

***

Kap was a segurista, a calculating, manipulative child of the streets, middle-born, petite, and the darkest of them all. Kap and Bok met when they were twelve and ten. Bok had been able to read organs ever since she was a little child—except she had been a giant child. She was so big they had to cut her mother in several places to get her out, resulting in over-bleeding. Nanotechnology would have been able to save Bok’s mother, but the rich had hoarded the technology instead of sharing it with the world.

But Bok never held grudges.

The first organ that ever talked to Bok was a penis. It was her father’s penis, and she did not like how it changed form or differed in mass whenever her younger sister walked naked into a room.

Organs, Bok said, were just different channels your body uses to tell you things about yourself. Each one has its own way of communicating, of telling stories about the body. Everyone was always crazy about the heart or the brain or the lungs. But it was the gut, Bok said, that was her favorite. Though the most underrated, it was the smartest organ. It revealed the greatest truth. Bok could see, smell, and hear the subtlest messages––minor anomalies in a person’s breathing, complexion, hair strength, posture. Together these told her the specific state of the body. People had hired Bok in the past to do discreet health checks on targets outside of Metro Tarak, who didn’t know about Bok’s talent.

Like most families in the villages north of Sector Fifty-six, Bok’s had been dirt-poor. Yet she talked about her hometown like it was the coolest place on earth. She’d talk about how people’s doors and gates were always open, not because they had nothing of value to protect, but because there was no reason to fear anything would be stolen. Which was basically the same thing, Kap had reasoned. Bok insisted it was different.

Bok would talk about street games getting temporarily suspended to wait for cousins who regularly fought with two-by-two-inch-thick rods to clear out. She would talk about parties that lasted three days, with drunk, pot-bellied men singing randy songs at the corner, alongside dogs getting soaped and washed in the street, and children sucking on sugar cubes or little plastic vessels of sweet powderized milk. She would talk about neighborhood stores that everybody pilfered from because they felt they had the right to.

A month into attending Pureza’s Saturday classes, Bok began drawing nephrons––the essential components of the kidney. Kap suspected Bok was hyperbolizing about just how intelligent these nephrons were, going on and on about how they spontaneously filtered everything running through a person’s bloodstream, keeping only what was useful and pissing out all the bad.

Kap was of two minds about this. Her chest beamed a happy sunflower of second-hand pride that Bok had finally realized she could understand science words if she put her mind to it. At the same time, a prickly heat bristled defensively in her underarms that so bothered Kap she almost let Bok put on her favorite video channel on their way to the cornea donor (but switched off the screen at the last moment).

The cornea donor was a shoemaker they knew. She was one of five who contacted Kap after they heard news of synthetic corneas from Mexico at the port. She had just discovered that she had been stiffed by foreign middlemen for years. Her ten-year-old had shown her a video of an influencer’s budget shoe haul. The cornea money was not only to pay for the loans she took out for her children’s schooling, but also to finance her shoe business, which required a minivan and an assistant.

“Family okay with this?” Kap asked, watching the donor’s husband on the weaved mat an arm’s-length away, feeding their rat-sized baby.

“We discussed it,” the shoemaker said. “No, he’s not,” Bok said.

Kap’s pen dropped. Bok never used to talk while Kap was interviewing. Kap saw Bok had a look of defiantness, of knowing something nobody else in the entire world could know.

“What do you mean?” the shoemaker asked. She looked at her husband, who said nothing.

“What are you doing?” Kap angry-whispered to Bok. To the shoemaker, she said, “You discussed it, and he was fine with you getting the synthetics?”

But the shoemaker wasn’t looking at Kap. “Why would you say that?” “Well, it’s not entirely a risk-free surgery,” Kap picked up, steering her away

from Bok. “But complications are very rare—”

The shoemaker waved her off. “I know that bit.” To Bok, “Why did you say he’s not? We talked. Why would—”

Bok made a squeezing sound at the back of her throat, the internal fight to keep things to herself fought and lost. “His stomach. Whenever we said eyes, cornea, surgery.” Bok held up her fist. “Tight, rolled-up sock.”

“Bok,” Kap warned. She could sell Bok’s ability as merely “heightened perception” to doctors. But regular people, especially in Metro Tarak––town of ancient cathode ray TV sets and seaside-specific superstitions––had their own ideas. The couple looked at each other.

The husband burst into tears. “How would you hear that from over there?”

“Witch doctor,” the shoemaker pronounced, scooting closer to Bok, swiftly forgetting her husband’s disapproval of the cornea donation. “I’ve heard about you. What else can you do?”

Cold and heat unfurled in Kap’s chest. “She’s not a witch doctor. We’re—” But Kap didn’t know what they were, not really. They weren’t medical professionals, they weren’t technicians. They were agents, no better than the greedy middlemen who had elbowed the shoemaker out of her own business.

They were to come back another day, when the shoemaker was ready, but not before she attempted to convince them to set up a faith healer op in the nearby plaza. For a cut. If only she had the same business savvy talking to her foreign wholesalers, Kap shot back.

On the road, Kap swerved and cursed at a couple of senior citizens on bikes. “But you always say, ‘Hurry up, time is gold, why you so slow, Bok? Chop chop!’” Bok suddenly explained. “So I told them.”

“You decide to listen to me today?”

“It’s cadaver day today.”

Kap pummeled the car horn at an already panicking passing duck. “What?”

“At Pureza’s. Remember I told you?”

There it was again, that look. Excitement and frustration and unfiltered glee. It was the ex-cannibal who had told Kap that Bok was a different kind of sharp. A look like that could mean anything from a life-changing breakthrough––like the day Bok decided to defend her little sister from their father’s penis by bludgeoning it with a palo-palo––to the sweet but ultimately mundane discovery that some dogs, like her, could smell cancer.

Bok then made a big show of filling Kap’s tumbler with water from her own.

By the close of fishing season at Metro Tarak, a skeleton teaching aid sat cross-legged, hand-on-chin, on Bok’s tiny desk in Kap’s boarding room, along with towers of medical books and organ replicas. Kap was okay with Bok’s obsessive streaks. She’d listened to Bok talk her ear off about how the fishing village lived and breathed like a human body: Mayora and the old ladies hummed and chattered like brains, the marketplace throbbed like a heart, fish flowed from fishermen to tables and markets like a bloodstream. She’d agreed when Bok argued that the belly, not the chest, should be what people point to when they talk about their feelings. She’d been supportive throughout Bok’s previous jobs–– as a scout for addicts for casino shares sales agents, as a victim hunter for the cannibal (short-lived), and a con-spotter for rich clients taking on financial risks.

And on those nights when Bok sleepwalked into the yard, dug a deep hole and slid down into it whispering, “I will be the tree, I will be the tree, I will be the tree,” Kap had stood by and hand-fed her crackers. There was only one line drawn: Bok was not allowed to read Kap’s organs.

Obviously, Kap was okay with weird. If she wasn’t, she wouldn’t have built her career around Bok’s weird skills. But the weirdness Kap sensed now was new, and it wasn’t just that Bok had flaked out on her six consecutive Fridays to attend extra sessions with Pureza. It was Kap’s feeling that Bok had somewhere better to be.

“The verse-chorus kids left the door open looking for you and this happened,” Kap said, pointing to the reeking pile that had been her class-A counterfeit designer handbag in the living room––a gang of red-footed boobies had mistook it for a cat and subsequently shat all over it.

“Did you eat?” Bok asked.

“I haven’t eaten because I was too busy filling in for you around here.” “Have water,” Bok said, offering her tumbler.

“You’re almost never around, and when you are, you’re letting these people use you for free,” Kap said. Kap had recently taken on Bok’s self-imposed visits to their eight previous donors to make sure they were still okay. Kap wasn’t actually sure whether this should be part of the whole illegal organ trade cycle, but since they saved so much on diagnostics because of Bok, she counted the cost as an operating expense.

“They’re our friends,” Bok said.

“Is Pureza your friend? Is that why he’s not paying you?”

“Not everything’s money,” Bok said.

“Are you rich? Everything’s about money, Bok. If it wasn’t, we would not be stuck in this backwards town while somewhere out there folks like Pureza are sitting in air-conditioned rooms enjoying infinite resolution VR, wearing Proper. People. Clothes!”

“Pureza says you should let me talk,” Bok said.

“Why does he think I don’t let you talk? You’re talking fine now.” Kap was livid.

“To clients,” Bok said.

Kap wanted to throw the shit-caked handbag at Bok. There were twenty things she thought about saying, but it shook her that none of them would make her sound like the good guy in this argument.

After six weeks with no Bok to coach them, the verse-chorus kids were begging Kap to help out. Kap would rather spend her time a hundred other ways, but knew she’d suffered far worse than watching third-graders fumble through long old-fashioned Tagalog words and fight over who gets to chase the “pig.”

Kap resisted for a few afternoons but buckled eventually. She cooked rice cakes for them, the first time since she’d done it with her mother. And while she had always felt insecure about cooking, she couldn’t resist the unfamiliar desire to feed Bok’s strange fan club of kids. It didn’t mean she wasn’t restless-leg nervous when the kids began chewing the coconut-covered palitaw in mindless post-performance hunger. But her nervousness dissolved as they came back for seconds. And thirds.

Then there was the neighbor with the bad ear and the neighbor with the wild goats. Without Bok around for impromptu consultations, Kap had to fill in. Bok had played so many roles in the village, many Kap wasn’t even aware of.

Extensive note-taking became necessary. Kap had to note a grown man’s bowel movements so Bok would know that his pipes were still clear. She had to note which of the five brown dogs riled the thymus donor’s nerves if it wasn’t fed quality table scraps. Kap did learn a thing or two. One of the skin recipients had been trying to teach the people in the village about money unsuccessfully, until Kap, searching her list of conversation starters asked, “Where does interest go?”

Kap got so entangled in proxying for Bok that before she knew what she was doing, a man offering his kidney, instead of getting a release form, received a lecture on handling his finances better, and how if he maybe told his wife he’d been lying about the “thriving chicken consulting business” he wouldn’t have to take such drastic measures. Kap threw up the moment the man left as she imagined a plump stack of thousand peso bills flying into the sunset. It got so bad she started peeing tiny red strands.

Proxying for Bok wasn’t all bad though. She had been spending a lot of time assisting one of their recent donors, the midwife who ran the maternity clinic. One day, staring down wide open labia at a crowning baby, surrounded by blood, mucus, and various other unknowable gunk, Kap felt incredibly, indescribably at peace.

Like Bok, Kap was no stranger to blood and violence, and there was no more violent and vulnerable time in a human life than live birth. In most domestic situations there was a lot of yelling and smacking and arm waving and birth was the same, except the crying at the end was very different. Kap thought about bringing up the new sense of peace she felt at the clinic to Bok, as a way to get revenge for Bok abandoning her. But she hesitated. It felt a little too much like breaking up.

The steam of Kap’s half-hearted desire for revenge sputtered. Kap couldn’t even call it revenge, but she sure as hell wouldn’t call it what it was: attention-seeking.

For months, she bonded with the midwife waiting for Bok to wonder a little what she was up to. Yet before she knew what was happening, she was renting VR pods to practice delivering babies. Kap even went to the big hospital to assist one of their mothers who had to get a C-section. Roaming around the different wards in her borrowed scrubs, Kap felt like she was getting away with something. Post-labor mothers gave up their statuses and stories freely while Kap advised and checked their vitals like a natural.

At the canteen, prancing around in a hospital gown and harassing a couple of orderlies, who would she find but Bok’s ex-cannibal friend. Seeing the woman made Kap feel nostalgic for the days they’d hung out in hospitals in search of organs––in the cannibal’s case, to eat; in Kap’s case, to buy and sell. Kap thought maybe the reason she got involved with the cannibal through Bok was the promise of blood and madness, the very craving she was fulfilling now with the heightened yet controlled chaos of deliveries. The arrangement had been cut short when Bok asked the cannibal, with a straight face, if the reason she ate people was so she wouldn’t feel quite so alone.

“I’ve been doing penance,” the cannibal said after a customary exchange of insults. She patted her stomach and showed Kap some paperwork saying she was participating in a medical trial growing organs inside her body. “Once I get to eight livers grown and donated, you can tell Bok I’m good again.”

“Bok doesn’t care about that,” Kap said, strangely jealous that after all these years the cannibal still thought about Bok fondly. She was going to stop herself from asking the follow up, but she knew it was something Bok would want to know. “Do you have friends now?”

“A few. But more importantly…” the cannibal whipped out a picture of an orange tabby.

Kap gave her a look.

The cannibal rolled her eyes, horrified at the insinuation.

Later she asked, “You and Bok living the good life like you’d always yap about? Even if you look like that?”

Kap thought about the brochures she’d saved and posted on her walls: espresso machines, Hummers, power-dressing, and how she’d taken them all down recently to make space for her study guides of the stages of fetal development. Then she thought about Bok, and how much fun she seemed to be having at Pureza’s.

“Bok could do better without me,” Kap said, finally. The cannibal agreed.

* * *

On the day Kap learned that her kidney was in bad shape, she went to the city for two things: to ask around for midwifery classes and to get Bok a medical scholarship application at Sector Fifty-six. When she got back, Bok said she wouldn’t apply. “Do you know residents do forty-hour shifts?” Kap knew exactly what Bok thought about not sleeping. She had to wonder if Pureza tolerated Bok’s inevitable soundless laughter at the concept of pushing people to make important decisions using dry brains.

“If you don’t want to be a doctor, why are you still with Pureza?” “I can’t tell you,” Bok said.

“Why not?”

“It would be reading.”

Kap sat down, understanding slowly that it might have been all about her, or at least something about her after all.

“It’s not reading if I’m not talking to you,” Bok seemed to have finally found some kind of opening. “Can you try not to listen?”

Kap neither nodded or refused.

Bok sat behind her and started humming some church song about being purified. Then, in a low voice, she said, “Since we were young, you’ve always known what to do. Whatever was thrown at you, good or bad, you made the most out of it. I’ve tried my best to help, make sure you were well-fed and hydrated. You’ve worked so hard, done so much just to make it through each day. But now I think it’s time.”

Tears welled in Kap’s eyes. The thought of ending their partnership was overwhelming. Guilt and sadness and Bok’s beautiful words mixed, forming an uncomfortable goop in her chest.

“Thank you for your service, night and day, removing acid and waste.” Kap stopped crying, confused.

“Maintaining your sodium levels, water levels, minerals,” Bok continued. Kap sniffed back her snot’s descent. Bok was talking to her kidneys.

Kap was the reason Bok was spending all her time with Pureza. It was part of an exchange: Bok taught Pureza and his students how to speak organ and Pureza (who Bok knew was a perfect donor for Kap) was to give Kap a new kidney. Pureza had a strangely specific talent of his own, that of generating a new kidney if he wanted to.

When Kap told Bok why she was crying––that she feared being alone, serving as midwife alone––Bok asked, “Why would I not deliver babies with you?”

“I’m a bad egg, Bok. I looked down on you, didn’t understand you, made you do things you didn’t want to do. Why would you do anything with me?”

Bok thought about this for a while. “When an organ you really like is a little bit beat up, do you just throw it away? Don’t you first try to help it heal and give it a shot?”

“Then why the hell were we doing it all?”

“Because we needed money,” Bok said.

Right then Kap felt like the luckiest person in the world, to have someone understand her in a way she couldn’t explain to herself. But also because Bok, organ whisperer extraordinaire, agreed to come with her to welcome babies into this messy, mixed bag of a world.

It occurred later to Kap while cleaning the clinic’s bloody floor, that she might have been lying to herself, that maybe she’d had a fine life all along. But she’d first punch a mad dog in the face before ever admitting such a scandalous thought to anyone.