There were six people in all, sitting at intervals along the walls. One was reading a book with an air of disinterest. Occasionally, he would look beyond the pages at a point fixed in space somewhere above the tank of water. The rest - three women and two men - sat listlessly, toying with their tubes and staring sullenly.

The length of the tubes, and their necessity, made it impossible for anyone to ever leave the room.

Still, these six souls should be considered lucky: they could be sharing a brain, or perhaps genitalia. The latter was especially awkward, for reasons you can well imagine.

Over all, they were relatively lucky, even if they didn't exactly realize it. They spent most of their time moping, hoping to win the organ lottery. Rumor had it that a woman two rooms away had won exclusive organ rights, and was free to move about from place to place. The odds against this were phenomenal, but it was nice to know that it did happen occasionally. But this slim hope wasn't enough to mitigate these dire circumstances in any way.

The only break in the monotony was when one of the faceless, interchangeable orderlies brought them their bowls of pasty tasting gruel. They always got six bowls, but only one spoon. They had established a pecking order pretty early on, so the order of the meal taking never changed. What did change were the lottery tickets hidden in the gruel. One ticket in every million bowls of gruel was a ticket to organ exclusivity. Little hope is better than no hope at all.

Of course, there was always the chance that somebody would draw a kidney failure ticket. This didn't happen often, but the dread of drawing this ticket was always there at mealtimes, pretty much balancing out the hope of drawing an organ exclusivity ticket.

It also served to pit the people in the room against each other. If too many people shared an organ for too long, the organ grew sick and expired. This meant failure for everybody. If enough people drew a kidney failure ticket (or other types of failure tickets, depending on the organ in question), sometimes a person won rights to organ exclusivity by default.

The actual execution of the failure card recipient was simple. There was a shadowy entity known (in this case, in this room) as The Kidney Failure Kid. He dressed like a bad guy from a spaghetti western - all in black. The only thing missing was the face. No eyes to impersonate Eastwood with, no mouth to clamp down over a cigar with. Just smooth blankness under a black cowboy hat.

You knew somebody's number was up when you saw The Kid. He just came in, knelt, and kinked somebody's hose. Good for the kidney; bad for you.

Then the orderlies came in and shuttled the body out, removing the organ donor card from wallet or purse, and nodding silently to themselves.

Oh, the dread of it all!
J5a(3)