I have been knocked unconscious on four occasions. The first we’ll come to presently; the second and fourth, I’m not ready to talk about yet. The third time was many years after I was discharged from the Marines, while I was still in training at the Credit Union. They’d hooked me up with one of the Level Threes, an old codger who’d joined up when it was all just Jarviks and some chain jobs, but he’d paid his dues, and as a result, he got a little assistance in the form of an apprentice. Only problem was, he wasn’t too keen on actually making the runs that were assigned to him, and as a result, I got a lot of single-handed on-the-job training, and fast.

One night, we’d been given the job of retrieving a set of kidneys from a deadbeat who owned a plumbing supply company down in the warehouse district. Easy enough job, fair pay, nothing good on TV that night to sap our interest. Standard commission, to be split 70 percent for the senior Bio-Repo man, 30 percent for me; I was fine with the division of the proceeds. I was between marriages that month, and it wasn’t hard to support myself on a steady diet of pasta and pretzels.

But when the time came to scootch our rumps down to the scene, my mentor gave out on me. Went to the movies, drank himself into a stupor, pulled a no-show. I could have waited until he was off the sauce, I suppose, petitioned the Union to push back the repossession appointment by a day or two, but back in those days the competition for jobs was fierce, and had I made any kind of fuss, odds were the case would have been reassigned. I knew the time would eventually come when I’d have to strike out on my own and make my bones, as it were, and this was as good as any. So I shut my trap and decided to go it alone.

The first step to any repo job is to map out the area. You’ve got to know where the client is, and you’ve got to know what else is nearby. How big is the house/office/hut in which he’s staying? Any other people inside? Are they on the phone? Are they armed? Are they on the phone with someone who is armed? That sort of thing.

I went through the motions. From the maps I’d obtained from a bribed county clerk, I figured the warehouse to be around 800 to 900 cubic meters, quite the sizable hideout. He was inside and alone; I could hear him fumbling around in there even without the aid of a powered listening device, but I knew it would be hard to pinpoint his location. For a moment I considered using alternate tactics to detain the client—I was in possession of a dart gun at the time, as well as a long-distance Taser—but those methods were less reliable and more dependent on my ability—or inability—to properly aim and fire. My first solo job, I decided, would have to be a smooth one. I broke out the ether.

Using my Union-issued pencil laser—a signing bonus they gave to new recruits, ours to keep even if we chose not to make a career in repossessions—I sliced open a small circle in a pane of glass just above the warehouse floor. A hose, a knob, a twist, and a flip. Three full canisters of ether slowly hissed their way into the structure, and I patiently sat there in the dark, pressing myself against the shadows, waiting for the drug to take effect. My training in dosage and doping was nearly as complete as any board-certified anesthesiologist, but you never find any country-club society matrons begging their daughters to marry the likes of me.

Fifteen-minute wait after the last canister had run its course, and then I decided it was time to go in and finish the job. I’d heard the telltale thunk of a falling body by the second tank of gas, so I knew the client was down for the count and prepped for the only surgery I knew how to perform. I had a gas mask on me, just in case the ether hadn’t yet completely evaporated, but I figured with a warehouse that size, there wasn’t any harm of overexposure.

I figured wrong. As soon as I stormed in the front door, I had only enough time to realize that the warehouse, while looking quite massive from the outside, had been segmented into a number of different offices on the inside, each of which was no more than 300 cubic meters. I tried to turn, I think, to realign my body in hopes of making a dash for the door, but the thick air, oversaturated in triplicate with great clouds of ether, shot up through my nose and hit my brain with a stunning one-two punch. My knees buckled; my shoulders sagged, and I fell hard on my knees as I sank to the floor. I had a bruise for two weeks.

I woke up that time to the enraged, puffy face of my mentor, his breath reeking of sour milk and rotten rum, screaming about how I’d almost let a client get away, and how he’d had to chase down the bum in the warehouse alley and pull out the guy’s kidneys with his bare hands.

In Italy, on the other hand, I woke up to a serene, porcelain vision of beauty leaning over me, her lab coat hanging open just a bit, the white cotton bra beneath barely visible against her skin, hand caressing my sweaty brow. She was waving a leather pouch beneath my nose that would have sent skunks reeling for cover, but all I could smell was the soft perfume caressing her neck.

“Take it easy,” she said as I tried to sit up. I was in a cot of some sort, no longer strapped down. Harold Hennenson was on the bed next to me, and the other soldiers from my platoon were milling about the room, shaking their heads, blinking their eyes, each in his own separate, special state of confusion. Only Jake was on top of his game, already laughing it up with the nurses and making fun of the rest of us.

“Did we get bombed?” I asked the doctor.

“No one was bombed. Lie back down.”

“That was the exam?”

“That was the exam.”

Harold sat up then, squirming onto the edge of his bed, leaning over toward mine. “Concussion test,” he said plainly. I could see his eyes floating around in their sockets, fluttering this way and that. “Wanted to see if we could take a hit.”

“You pass out, too?” I asked.

Harold nodded, dropped his head. Ashamed, perhaps. “Yeah,” he said, “I didn’t take it too well.”

“Maybe if they’d have hit you in the stomach…” I suggested.

This perked him up a little, and we spent the next twenty minutes drinking juice and clearing our heads, until we, too, were given clearance to pace the room in a half stupor, struggling to remain upright and dignified.

They gave us other tests, of course—vision tests, hearing tests, memory tests, reflex tests, tests of our sense of smell and our sense of taste, tests that seemed to go on forever, and tests that took no more than fifteen seconds. At the end of each, we were given a sheet of paper with a series of numbers on it, digits that were incomprehensible to us but caused our superiors to ooh and aah to no end.

A week later, we were ordered to line up and accept our new assignments, the posts at which we would train before heading out to Africa. Harold was two men down from me; Jake was a row back.

Sergeant Ignakowski ran through the names and assignments rapid fire. “Burns, Engineering. Carlton, Infantry. Dubrow, Infantry…”

As for me, Jake, and Harold, we got to drive a tank.

Six months later, I finally got up the nerve to ask Tig why I was placed on tank duty as opposed to some less colorful and more relaxation-intensive job. We were sitting inside a makeshift tent in the middle of the African desert, waiting for the orders that would send us back out into the field. We drank water from small foil pouches that never seemed to go dry, and recently I’d been sucking down as much moisture as possible, trying to reconstitute myself after fifteen days in the 110 degree heat. The fighting machines used by the Marines in those days might have been fierce, but they were not well air-conditioned.

“You got tanks because that’s what the brass decided,” Sarge told me. He’d just come back from HQ, and was still done up in his dress whites, the pits and back shining through with perspiration, dripping to the floor in a Niagara of sweat.

“From those tests?”

“Some of ’em.”

“Which ones?”

Sarge didn’t even try to fudge the answer. He always let you know the truth, and didn’t care much of what the response would be. “Remember the concussion blast?” he said. I nodded. “That was the one. You, Freivald, Hennenson, scored in the top range, so they put you in tanks.”

I still didn’t quite understand. “So we…we didn’t get concussions?”

“No,” said Tig. “You all got concussions, pretty damn bad. But you came out of it sooner’n the rest of ’em, got control of your bodies. Guess you boys have bigger skulls than the others, so the pressure came off faster. That, or you’ve got smaller brains. Either way, tanks is tanks. Time to ship back out.”

Bigger skulls and smaller brains. This was the kind of military precision with which we won the war in Africa.

I slept just now. Thirty minutes, maybe more. I hope it’s more a sign that my body is adapting to the circumstances, and less a sign that I’m becoming complacent, that somewhere in my mind I’ve decided that rest is more important than vigilance.

My lack of restlessness may also be due to that note I found in my typewriter yesterday. The more I try not to think about it, the more I’m drawn back:

Shut up.

So curt. So final. I can’t help but wonder who wrote it, and where they might be. And why they might be. The Tyler Street Hotel might be a great place to hide out, but it’s my place to hide out; if there are other residents, I’d like to make their acquaintance. I may consider charging rent.

I have heard sounds at night, come to think of it. A bang or two from one of the lower floors, a creaking strut here or there. But these are the noises that come with any burned-out twentieth-century hotel, and although my stomach bottoms out with every thump and click, although my hands leap for their scalpels at every creak, I never before considered the possibility that these sounds could eventually bring me comfort. But I have been alone for months, and though isolation is very much the common thread that runs through any Bio-Repo man’s life, it’s one I’m always keen to cut.

I don’t have any delusions about my ability to stay sane on my own: I’m a five-time winner, nuptially speaking, and there’s got to be a reason for my inability to stay single for any protracted length of time.

Second trip to the psychiatrist with Carol, and the same shrink who told me I had a great capacity for love proceeded to tell me that I had a number of unresolved fears.

“You know what I do for a living, right?” I asked.

He nodded. Knew full well. “But that doesn’t preclude the very real notion that you’ve got a lot of deep-set fear.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Death.”

“Who doesn’t? What else?”

“Failure.”

“And you don’t?”

“Loneliness,” he said with a sly wink toward my wife.

I shook it off. “You know how many people there are in this world, Doc? Eight billion of us on this planet. A two-toed leper can’t even find himself an isolated space without another six lepers coming by to say howdy. I can’t be scared of loneliness—there’s no such thing anymore.”

That’s not entirely true, I know now. Ninth year as a full Repo man, and I had just taken on a case to run out a Ghost system from James “T-Bone” Bonasera, a one-time music producer out in the suburbs. This guy had engineered some of my favorite songs back in the day, tunes me and the boys piped through the tank intercom system when the battle signs were down—this was the fellow who produced the Sammy Brand Trio’s recording of “Baby in My Sleeve,” of all things—and despite my reluctance to get involved with Ghost work, I felt like I owed it to the guy to tell him how much I appreciated his music before I ripped out his central nervous system.

I don’t enjoy Ghost work. I’m not technically licensed for it, in fact, though every Bio-Repo man has done his fair share, authorization or not. I can understand a man needing a better pancreas or a spanking-new set of aluminum lungs, but when it comes to replacing and augmenting something as abstract as sense and memory, I tend to bow out and let the spooks do their job. Don’t get me wrong—some of my best friends do a little pimping for the Ghost. But you’ve got to have a certain amount of empathy to get it done right, and that’s where I come up short.

But the money was fantastic, the opportunity to meet a personal champion too great to pass up, and so I headed out to the suburbs. The back alleys and mangy street dogs soon gave way to paved sidewalks and scampering children, and the smells took on a decided twist of pine and oak. The leaves had just begun to change, and though we had reds and yellows in the city, they seemed so much more proper out there, in the same way a bottle of red wine tastes better in Venice, Italy, than it does in Venice, California.

The home was a mansion, 20,000 square feet, easy, but I was glad for its size. Any smaller, and I’d have been tempted to gas it out first, thus losing my opportunity to speak with the man. As it was, I’d never have enough ether to fill a house that size in any prudent amount of time, so I’d have to resort to more personal measures.

Gates, a half-mile driveway, topiary bushes gone to seed. T-Bone was still living in the mansion, I’d been told, but the IRS had turned the full power of their spotlight on his financial records and come up with more than a few question marks. As a result, they had attached his residuals from the last ten albums, and then added in the proceeds from the next ten as well, just to be on the safe side. The bankruptcy auction was set for a week from that Wednesday. House, furnishings, cars—he was broke beyond broke, and they were taking it all back. Unfortunately for him, so were we.

I found him down in the music studio he’d built in the east wing of the house, headphones wrapped around his ears, eyes closed, grooving intently to whatever was playing over the forty-track system. I stood there for a good ten minutes, watching him as he fiddled with the mixing board, fine-tuning whatever this newest piece might be.

Eventually, T-Bone sat upright and removed his headphones, placing them carefully atop the board. Without turning around, he said, “Good evening.” His voice was low, gravelly, as if he needed to replace his own woofers. “You’re from the IRS?”

“No.”

“Good,” he said. “Soul-suckers are taking everything back.”

“So am I,” I said.

He nodded. Took this new info in, and quickly made his peace with whatever gods he saw fit. “I see. Could I please finish this song?”

I looked at my watch. There was another outstanding job that day, but I remember thinking that it was just as easily done later that night or the next morning. “Of course,” I told him, stepping back to wait my turn. “I’m a big fan. ‘Baby in My Sleeve’…fantastic.” I stopped before going whole-hog fanatic on him; it wouldn’t have been the professional thing to do.

But he turned then, got up and came toward me—he was a wiry fellow, tics of energy flipping his limbs into spastic jerks—grabbing my arm, leading me toward the board. “You can help,” he said. “I haven’t had an assistant for months.”

I protested that I wasn’t trained, that I’d never even touched a mixing board before, but he claimed it was no matter. “Song’s just a mess of little parts,” he said, “all working together. All you need to do is listen for the parts inside the whole. If you can isolate the parts, pull ’em out and mix ’em around, we can improve the overall effect.”

I told him I thought I might be qualified for the job.

The song I helped him mix that day—“Tailor Made Five” by Susan Lundi’s Orchestra—became a posthumous platinum hit, and though I didn’t get any credit on the inside jacket, I told everyone down at the Union that I’d helped out a little on the trumpets and vibes.

After two and a half hours, we were done with the mix, the sound was hopping, and the producer had already sucked up enough Q to kill a Clydesdale. He offered me the sparkling red powder on six or seven occasions, each time forgetting that I had flatly refused it not ten minutes before. I wasn’t surprised to find, when I finally got the neuro-net out of him, that the central processor was crusted over, filthy with crystallized cerebrospinal fluid. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you’re hooked on the Q, and it’s a shame that even after the most expensive of artiforg implantations, he wasn’t able to reprogram himself to beat the habit.

He’d been on his own for nine months, he told me, after his wife had taken their twin baby girls and fled to their second home in Jamaica, and since then hadn’t seen another soul until I broke in to steal his brain. He’d somehow been operating via the U.S. Postal service, connecting with the music companies, the bands, and the rest of the outside world solely by the slowest means of modern communication. As a result, his conversations were impossibly stunted, gaps of understanding and intent inherent within three-week-long mail deliveries, and it was this, more than anything else, that had contributed to his final detachment from reality. True loneliness, I learned that day, isn’t the lack of others. It’s the lack of others quickly.

Good news:

I went out for Thai food tonight, which is to say that I broke into the back room of a local restaurant, stole some cooking smocks, and snuck into the kitchen of my favorite eatery dressed as one of their own. I had two orders of pad kee mao and one of panang chicken curry stuck beneath my jacket before any of the regular kitchen staff noticed that I was neither Thai nor anything remotely resembling Thai, and I was out the door seconds later. Took the long way back to the hotel, slurping up one container of noodles as I went, staring up at the surrounding high-rises as I walked. If I stared hard enough, I could make out shadows even in those apartments and offices without lights, dull silhouettes moving back and forth in the darkness.

Rather than zip up to my room as usual, I stood outside the Tyler Street Hotel, grabbing a seat on the sidewalk across the street. The concrete was cold, but soon warmed up as I set to eating the chicken, the fiery spices of the curry sending beads of sweat up to my brow. I kept my eyes trained on the building above, not staring at any one spot too long. The trick to seeing in darkness—without an infrared scope, of course—is to keep the pupils moving back and forth, scanning horizontally for movement before locking in on a location. This was one of the tricks they taught us during tank training. Then again, they also taught us how to defecate in place without squatting, making a sound, or removing our pants, so not everything that came out of my military experience translated completely into civilian life.

After forty-five minutes of scanning and sucking noodles, I was prepared to tuck in for the night. But as I flipped onto my haunches, preparing to sneak back inside the hotel, a burst of shadowy movement up on the top floor caught my attention. I looked, glanced away, then looked back again, and sure enough, there it was, a vaguely human-shaped silhouette that had not been there before. It had stopped moving as soon as I spotted it, but I got the distinct impression that as I was staring up, it was staring down.

I bolted into the hotel lobby.

Thirteen floors later, I was still running strong, and I slammed open the stairwell door with a mighty crash. No use being quiet now; it was too late at night for any nearby residents to care about the noise, and I was more than happy to spook out whoever was sharing the hotel with me.

The penthouse was empty. Floor-to-ceiling windows—some intact, others not so much—afforded a view of the downtown slums and the bright possibilities of the city beyond, but the room itself was abandoned. The walls were coated in the same dull ash as mine downstairs, only these looked like they may have had some semblance of a normal color beneath the char.

The floor, though, was curiously devoid of dust, and the one other flat surface, a rusted-out metal table in the center of the room, was clean enough for even the most ardent of germaphobes to eat off.

For a moment, I considered jogging back downstairs and grabbing one of the few scopes I had, maybe an infrared to pick up on lagging heat signals, but I realized that in the time it would take me to go down and back up, I’d lose whatever traces might be lingering around, waiting to die off.

So I ran a check the old-fashioned way. Fingers along the floorboards, eye to the walls. Searching for hairs, for nails…

For clothing fibers. On an inside doorway, one foot above the ground, a broken rusty nail poked its way out of the wall. I squatted down and took a gander, focusing my eyes as best I could on that minuscule shard of metal.

Beige. See-through. Stretchy. It was a smidgen of nylon. Someone had run through here in a hurry, and someone had torn her pantyhose.

So, as I said, good news:

I’m living with a woman again.