The Dismantling (2 page)

In the apartment, he went to his computer to search for a clip of the play on the internet. Plummer had been paralyzed from the neck down; he'd nearly died. Simon remembered learning about this in the sports pages the following day and finding his own confused adolescent feelings to be incommensurate with the reality of what had occurred. He knew sadness was the appropriate emotional response, but he'd found it difficult to think of Plummer as an individual existing off the field, as a person rather than a player; before the injury, he hadn't been notable enough for anybody to interview, and when Simon tried to think of his face, all he saw was the shadowing helmet and face mask. Years later they'd trot Plummer out, in his wheelchair, to various functions—hall of fame inductions, stadium dedications—but the trickle of appearances slowed and then stopped, and Alvin Plummer again faded out of the public imagination until he died, just a few months ago, of some kind of lung infection, a delayed complication of his paralysis.

And now, in one of the NFL's occasional paroxysms of brand management, the hit seemed to have been wiped from the internet. Simon clicked from one YouTube clip to the next, sifting through dozens of brain-rattling hits from pro, college, and high school games. He wanted to see how his memory of the injury matched its visual record, but he couldn't find Crewes and Plummer. He stopped instead on some of the high school clips. They had a snuff-film feel to them: ripped from shaky handheld footage, climaxing with a laid-out body, coaches kneeling over the injured player while the other team's kids—fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds—jumped around and slapped each other on the helmet. In the comments section people wrote things like “That dude got raped!!!” and “OWNED.” Simon watched a few of these, the collisions replayed in lascivious slow motion. It was difficult to look away, but finally, overwhelmed by a greasy sense of complicity, he forced himself to close the window.

 • • • 

O
N
the following humid and colorless morning, he waited down the block from the Health Solutions office, at the corner of Sixty-Second and Second, chain-smoking Parliaments until a black Lexus with tinted windows pulled up exactly on time and emitted three short blasts of its horn. Inside, Crewes wore a black cardigan and a pair of circular, purple-tinted sunglasses that gave him the appearance of a dandyish, late-career jazzman. He acknowledged Simon with a nod before he pulled away from the curb, cutting east and accelerating across the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, the Roosevelt Island tram dangling in the murk outside the window like some giant tree-borne fruit. They swooped down onto Queens Boulevard and exchanged one eastbound highway for another until, forty-five minutes later, Crewes exited the Southern State for local roads. Soon they were in Leonard Pellegrini's town, a collection of single-family clapboard homes, strip malls, and auto dealerships wedged between its wealthier bayside neighbor and the Sunrise Highway.

Crewes pulled onto the weedy yard of a small yellow house. He got out of the car without comment, and Simon followed him across the yard and up the porch steps. Midday was shadowless, without contrast; no visible sun, just a high, white brightness. Crewes opened the screen and rapped on the front door, which was yanked open quickly enough to suggest their arrival had been watched.

“Yeah?” A sunburned nose surfaced out of a sea of freckles. The girl was sixteen or seventeen, streaky blond hair pulled back into a tight bun.

“Lenny here?”

She looked at Crewes, then Simon, then behind them. “Why are you parked on the lawn?”

“It's where Lenny tells me to park. So I don't block the garage.”

“Bullshit,” she said, then blushed.

“Look, sweetheart,” Crewes said, “why don't you tell him I'm here. Howard. He's expecting me.”

She seemed about to tell them off, then reconsidered. “Wait,” she commanded, before disappearing into the darkened recesses of the house, letting the door bang shut in their faces.

“Who's that?”

Crewes shrugged. “Who knows? Lenny's lived around here his whole life. A lot of people still want to help him.”

The door opened again, and the girl, looking pissed off, said, “He's in the kitchen.” She marched by them and picked up off the grass a bicycle Crewes had nearly run over, wheeling it onto the sidewalk before pedaling around the corner and out of sight.

“Let me start the talking.” Crewes took off his sunglasses. “You take over whenever you think it's best.”

Simon nodded. He didn't like sharing control of the situation like this, but he wanted to observe Crewes and Lenny, to better understand the dynamic of their relationship, before he made his pitch and asked his questions.

The inside of the house was dim, as Crewes's had been, but any similarities ended there. Simon's general impression was of mildew and unleveled floors. Leonard Pellegrini sat at a Formica table in the kitchen, swirling a glass of what appeared to be Coca-Cola on ice. He glanced at Simon, then continued to inspect his drink. “Nancy said there were two of you.”

“You know who he is,” Crewes said.

“The organ grinder.”

“Don't be an asshole, Lenny.”

Simon fixed a neutral smile onto his face. So: it appeared Leonard Pellegrini hadn't agreed to any of this yet. It would've been helpful if Crewes had let Simon in on this little fact. The man downed half his drink, the glass a toy in his hand. He was enormous, six foot five or six and wide as a car, and yet his bulk seemed inflatable, as though he'd been drained of all substance.

“Have a seat,” he said. He reached out and opened the refrigerator without getting up, grabbing a can of Coke and refilling his glass. “Soda?”

“You got Jack in yours,” Crewes said. “I can smell it from here.”

“Not true.” Lenny assembled his features into a hurt expression. “I really resent that, Howard.” He winked at Simon as though they were schoolmates goofing off in class. His hair fell across his face, and he brushed at it distractedly.

“Let's have that soda.”

Lenny reached into the refrigerator, pulled out another can. Then he reached under his chair and came up with a fifth of Jim Beam. “Told you it wasn't Jack.”

“I came here to save your ass,” Crewes said, “and you want to fuck around.”

Lenny just smiled into his drink. In the fluorescent light of the kitchen his skin was waxy and sallow; acne scars flecked his cheeks and forehead. His legs emerged from his mesh shorts like a pair of weather-ravaged marble columns, a pink scar running down the middle of each knee.

“They bother you much?” Simon asked. Crewes shot him a quick glance. “The new knees.”

Lenny ran his fingers across one of the scars as though he'd just noticed it. “Not that new anymore. Howard, buddy, what'd I say about all this, huh? What'd I tell you?”

“What you said wasn't worth hearing. You know what your problem is? You have no sense of yourself anymore. You were a professional football player, Lenny. That's something just about nobody gets to be. You should respect that. But instead you sit in this kitchen five miles from where you were born and drink yourself to death like you don't have a choice.” Simon got the impression that this speech was as much for his benefit as Lenny's. “It's like the good part of your life never happened,” Crewes continued, “and you just woke up eight years later, fatter and with two titanium knees.”

“And arthritis,” Lenny said.

“And arthritis.”

“And the headaches.”

“We all get the headaches.”

“Not like I do.”

“Maybe not.”

“Did Cheryl find him?”

“I did. But it's nice you remember you still have a wife. Do I need to remind you about your kids too?”

Lenny suddenly turned to Simon. “So who would it be? Some sad fuck from Mexico?”

Simon suppressed a flinch. Lenny's attention was flavored with hostility and bitterness, his entire personality expressed as a challenge. “I can guarantee the donor will be American.”

“Oh, good. The homegrown poor.”

“Whoever he is,” Crewes said, “he'll be a lot less poor afterward.”

“That doesn't mean I have to feel good about it.”

“The donors,” Simon said, trying to gain control of the conversation, “they come looking for us. They know what they're getting into. We tell them exactly what to expect. Maybe you've read stories about what happens in other countries. Careless doctors. No follow-up care. Shady brokers.” He allowed himself a small smile, sinking into the familiar patter—all the easier because he believed it to be more or less true—and feeling it temporarily muffle his anxiety. “That's not what we're talking about here. Our transplants take place at a top New York City hospital, with top surgeons. It's as safe as this surgery can be. Which, by the way, is very safe.”

“You're not mentioning the fact that it's illegal.”

“But I don't think it should be. Neither do all the people we've helped who'd still be waiting for a legal transplant when they're dead.”

Lenny shrugged, unmoved. “Maybe that's how things were meant to go for those people.” He grimaced as he stood up, his hand straying to a stomach that Simon now noticed was swollen and bloated looking. He limped out to the back porch, carrying the bottle of Beam with him. Crewes motioned for Simon to stay put before he followed Lenny outside.

Simon looked around the kitchen, which was small and neat, though he couldn't imagine Lenny was the person who cleaned it. Stuck to the refrigerator was a note that read, in loopy, optimistic handwriting, “Every Tues 1 PM: session w/ Jen. Every 2nd wknd: Greg and Dani. Sunday AM: CHURCH.” He sat at the table, fiddling with Crewes's can of soda. He didn't like how he was being forced to persuade Lenny of the moral viability of Health Solutions' entire business model. This meeting was supposed to be about his evaluation of Lenny as a recipient, not a referendum on the ethics of how he'd spent the last eight months of his life; he was ambivalent enough about that already without a gravely ill potential client piling on. He could see the two of them through the window, leaning against the porch railing. Crewes pointed back at the house—at Simon maybe—but Lenny wouldn't look.

Crewes came back inside a few minutes later.

“He'll come around,” he said, walking through the kitchen. “You did all right.”

 • • • 

C
ABRERA
Medical Center had always been the second of Roosevelt Island's two hospitals: second built, second choice, second rate. Silver River Memorial, at the northern tip of the island, was a solid, geriatrics-centric public hospital that knew what it was and didn't try to be anything else. Cabrera, down on the island's south side, past the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge and the pustular tennis bubble, had been conceived in the 1970s as an oncology center to challenge Sloan Kettering, yet it had somehow ended up, thirty years later, as a repository for the overflow of gunshot and car-crash victims from Long Island City, Astoria, and Greenpoint. The buildings were shabby; the manner of care chaotic. In 2005 the facilities were purchased by a national hospital chain whose first order of business was the construction of a new transplant wing. Before it could become the money maker the chain was betting on, the first thing this new wing needed was surgeons; these it now had. The second was patients (or, perhaps more accurately, “clients”); these the hospital's administrators were still working on, which put the unit under enough pressure to churn out transplants that its surgeons weren't inclined to look too closely at whatever donors their coordinators fed to them.

Not long after Simon had learned all of this from DaSilva, he got to see the transplant wing for himself. On his first day after moving into an apartment building near Silver River Memorial, he walked the perimeter of the island. It wasn't much of a walk: the island was only two miles long and less than a quarter mile wide. After crossing beneath the bridge and its deep pool of shadow, he was presented with his first view of Cabrera: a long, squat central building streaked with soot and bisected by three smaller wings. (Later, looking down on the hospital from the tram, he'd thought it resembled a giant stitch sewn into the land.) He kept walking south along the riverside path, past a group of young men in wheelchairs—all smoking cigarettes and staring at the river, bundled under blankets, not speaking—past a cluster of willow trees, a parking lot, and then there it was, the new wing: a weird, asymmetrical structure, like an oval with a dent in one side, constructed out of turquoise glass and steel. According to DaSilva, the building had been designed in the shape of a kidney, although this seemed too ridiculous to be true and was likely just Peter fucking with him. It was as though a small chunk of one of the new condos springing up like weeds in Williamsburg had somehow ended up here, flicked aside like a bitten nail. A glass-sided skywalk ran over the parking lot, connecting the new wing to the old hospital. A group of nurses burst out of the main building and headed toward the riverside path, breath steaming and hands flashing as they produced cigarettes, lighters, gum, candy bars. Simon stood and watched as the light drained from the sky, the new wing glowing, doctors rushing back and forth across the skywalk, the wheelchair-bound patients quiet and shadowed under the willows by the river's edge.

Eight months later, and Simon had still not set foot inside Cabrera. He did his work in his apartment or at the Health Solutions office, a small room in an anonymous building in the East Sixties, off Second Avenue. The building was filled with small-scale independent businesses—dentists, physical therapists, tax accountants, the kind of operations that didn't require more than a room or two. There was no company name on the office's door, only the suite number. It was more important that their room appear to be a functioning office than actually be one, and so the space exhibited a sense of the generic, like an IKEA display: a blond-wood desk, a bookcase lined with medical reference texts, a Barcelona Couch, desktop PC, printer, fax machine, ergonomic chair.