The Dismantling Read Online Free

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.
    Eight months, and he’d already put together a dozen deals; all kidneys and all medically and financially successful. This case with Lenny was his first liver, and livers, DaSilva told him, were where the real money was. It was the more expensive surgery, the more valuable organ. (Also the more risky surgery and grueling recovery, for both donor and recipient.) Liver transplantation was the field in which Cabrera Medical Center had decided to make its name and its fortune, and so it was the field on which Health Solutions would now focus. In addition, the few other domestic brokers DaSilva was aware of traded exclusively in kidneys, which made livers, he said, the definition of an opportunity.
    So far Health Solutions had not been, for Simon, a particularly difficult job, at least not operationally. (Morally was perhaps another question.) The donors were always enmeshed in some pedestrian sort of financial trouble, and what concerned them were the hard figures: the payout, the time away from work, the insurance ramifications.
Is the surgery safe?
they’d sometimes ask, and Simon would tell them yes, it is. They’d nod, as though they hadn’t researched this themselves before they found the courage to send an e-mail to the contact address listed on the slickly designed and factually scant Health Solutions website. That their sale might buy someone ten or twenty more years of life was understood as a kind of bonus, a renewable interest on their payout, the kind of thing they could turn to for some small measure of consolation when the new money ran out, which it nearly always did, DaSilva admitted, and often sooner than they expected.
    Simon had found the buyers trickier. Some of them wanted to know everything about their donors; they wanted to be told exactly how their money would transform these people’s lives. Others wanted to know nothing and seemed to prefer to think of the purchased kidney as the miraculous product of a lab.
    When he first took the job, Simon wondered how he would possibly locate donors. Recipients he understood. These people talked to each other; there were message boards, forums, as well as old-fashioned word of mouth. Theirs was a community that traded in the currency of hope. Besides, Peter DaSilva had access, through his coordinating job at Cabrera, to two of the relevant waiting lists: the United Network for Organ Sharing’s and Cabrera’s own. He knew who needed a liver or a kidney, who wasn’t going to get one anytime soon, and who could afford to pay a lot of money not to wait any longer. When someone