The Dismantling Read Online Free Page A

fulfilled all three criteria, he might offhandedly direct the candidate to one of a few online message boards populated by the transplant community, where, under pseudonymous handles, Simon posted testimonials describing how a friend or a spouse or an uncle had found the answer to his transplant troubles by contacting the good folks at Health Solutions. That DaSilva himself was involved with this company—was, in fact, its proprietor—never occurred to the candidates, which was, of course, exactly how he wanted things.
    Donors though? It wasn’t as if Simon could just walk around Times Square, waving a wad of cash. This wasn’t Chennai or Manila in the nineties, where whole neighborhoods of young men, he’d heard, would suddenly exhibit the exact same scar in the exact same location on their torsos. During his first meeting, before DaSilva had finished explaining how Health Solutions worked, Simon imagined he’d have to fly to Brazil, Turkey, Syria, Moldova, offering a few thousand dollars and a trip to New York City to whomever was willing to part with a kidney. He’d imagined skulking around the worst neighborhoods of New York like a drug dealer or a pimp, trawling for the desperate, the easy marks. He didn’t know if he could bring himself to do it. The exploitation was too frank, the moral ambiguity of utilitarianism shading into the self-evident amorality of raw, unfettered capitalism.
    But it turned out none of this was necessary, not anymore. Not in 2008. It turned out that plenty of people in what one might think of as the middle class—or people who were once in that class or who wanted to appear to be in that class—were open to the idea. Why not sell something that cost you nothing to own in the first place? It was a kind of entrepreneurship of the body, a utilization of previously untapped resources. These weren’t people in need of food or shelter. These were people in need of a car, college tuition, debt relief. Simon’s very first client wanted LASIK and a nose job; why not, she reasoned, let one surgery pay for two more? As the spring of 2008 slipped into summer, and now turned to fall, the list of people—American citizens, no less—who might be interested in the company’s services grew longer and longer, and Simon’s e-mail inbox began to brim with the kind of inquiries he’d feared he would have to sift through the most wretched corners of the third world to find. As the jobs accumulated, Simon’s ethical queasiness over his role in these transactions was calmed by his donor-clients’ embrace of a wonderfully mutable philosophy of self-empowerment, a worldview that made easy room for the conversion of flesh to cash, for the literal capitalization of the self. These people knew the score, knew what they were getting into, at least as much as they could without having gone through it already. Who was he to stand priggishly in judgment of them or of himself?
    Also, he was making badly needed money—and fast—which didn’t hurt.
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    I MMEDIATELY after visiting Lenny, Simon told DaSilva about Howard Crewes’s role as sponsor and planner. He also told DaSilva that Lenny was still drinking. But Peter didn’t think this would be a problem: “Can this Crewes guy really pay?”
    â€œHe’s got the money, yeah.”
    â€œAll right.” DaSilva’s voice came through the pay phone clear and strong, Bronx street traffic fulminating somewhere behind him. “Then unless Leonard Pellegrini dies before I can get him into the OR, we’ll make it happen.”
    â€œPeter,” Simon said. This attitude seemed unusually aggressive for DaSilva, who for the last eight months had preached nothing but risk management, turning aside dozens of candidates, both donors and recipients, because of one irregularity or another. Maybe the success of the last run of deals had