Karen Bender - Refund - Stories

“Aurora. I’ll save you,” he said; the sound of these words comforted him. “I swear it.”

But she did not let him touch her — she backed away from him with a dim expression. She was already disappearing and believed this was what people had truly wanted from her all along.

HE SKIPPED WORK. HE DID NOT SLEEP. THE RIGHT HEART WAS NOT appearing. He tried to think about who would give up their heart for millions of dollars. Drug addicts, the terminally ill — but their hearts would be in poor shape. He sat behind the dark glass of his limo, grimly watching girls play soccer, wishing one of them would trip. He imagined his Mercedes plowing into a group of teenage boys running on the sidewalk, killing enough of them to give Aurora more of a chance.

He proposed to his staff a special episode: “Who Will Die For Money.” They would audition people willing to give up their hearts for a staggering pot of $5 million. His staff thought it was a PR stunt and called an audition. The holding room filled with an assortment of the homeless, individuals not in the best health, and well-dressed, shifty types who seemed to think there was some way to obtain the money without dying.

They were all busily filling out their names and addresses when he got a call from Rosita.

“A heart has arrived on the doorstep,” she said.

He rushed home.

A man identified himself as a cardiac surgeon and a purveyor of black-market hearts. He was from Ukraine. Dr. Stoly Michavcezek sat in Lenny’s living room, holding a Styrofoam ice chest on his lap.

“Whose heart was this?” asked Lenny.

“A man. Olympic gymnast. Fell on mat and dead. Few hours. Payment up front.”

They transferred the heart, quickly, to Lenny’s enormous Sub-Zero freezer; then Lenny brought in a specialist from Cedars-Sinai to look at the heart.

“This isn’t a human heart,” said the doctor. “This is the heart of a chimp.”

When he returned to the studio, the prospective contestants had all been dismissed, and black-suited men from the legal department were waiting in his office.

“Lenny,” said one. “This has got to stop.”

AURORA WORKED ON HER MOVIE OBSESSIVELY; SHE SPENT MUCH OF her time in her room. When they had a meal together, he did most of the talking; he lied about his closeness to saving her. “There’s a doctor in Mexico,” he’d say, “a small hospital. International laws, they’re all we have to get around. .” She ate very little and watched him like a child who had disbelieved adults her whole life.

One night, she burst out of her room and hurried to her seat at the table. “My plot has changed,” she said. “Listen. There are seventeen aliens from the planet of Eyahoo. They have legs in the shape of wheels and heads like potatoes. Their planet is very slippery, and they move very fast on their wheels. Often they bump into each other. Their heads are getting sore.”

He listened.

“They need a new cousin who can make their planet less slippery. Their cousin is named Yabonda, and she lives on a neighboring planet. She has long legs with huge feet that are very absorbent, like paper towels. They want to learn how to have feet like her. Now. Do you think they should maybe invite her to Eyahoo for dinner or just come and kidnap her?”

She leaned back in her chair, clasped her hands tightly, and watched him.

“What would happen with each?” he asked.

“If they asked her to dinner, she would be transported in a glamorous carriage made of starlight.”

“Uh-huh.”

“If they kidnapped her, it would hurt.” She stretched out her fingers, as though trying to hold everything. “Tell me,” she said, sharply.

WHEN AURORA HAD LEARNED ABOUT HER CONDITION, SHE STOPPED stealing. Lenny began leaving things out for her — his cell phone and toothbrush and car keys — in the hope that she would take them, but in the morning, they remained where he had left them. He missed her midnight rambling through the mansion, waking up to see which objects of his she would find precious.

One night, he heard her footsteps padding down the hall.

Lenny jumped out of bed and followed her. This time, Aurora seemed to have no particular direction, but went around the foyer like a floating, circling bird. Then she saw Lenny. They stared at each other in the dusk of the hallway, and the shocked quiet around them made Lenny feel that they were meeting for the first time.

Aurora began to cry. “I don’t know what to take.”

The girl knelt to the floor and threw up. The child’s distress made Lenny feel as though he himself were dissolving.

“Take me,” said Lenny.

The girl stared at him.

“I’ll go with you,” said Lenny.

“Where?”

“Wherever. I’ll go too.”

“How?”

“I can find a way to do it.”

He did not know how to stop these words, did not know if they were lies or the truth — they simply came out of him.

“I don’t want to be by myself,” said Aurora.

He closed his eyes and said, “I’ll be there, too.”

When the dawn came, he was sleeping on the floor beside Aurora’s bed. He woke up, his promise an inchoate, cold feeling in his body; then he remembered what he had said.

He got up quietly and left the room.

IT WAS JUST SIX IN THE MORNING. LENNY WENT TO HIS GARAGE AND got into his red Ferrari convertible. He shot up the Pacific Coast Highway, feeling the engine’s force vibrate through his body. The highway stretched, a ribbon reaching through the blue haze to the rest of the world. He felt poisoned by the girl’s presence in himself and wanted to get her out.

By eight o’clock, he had hit Santa Barbara. The main street was filled with a clear golden light, and the people strolling the sidewalks looked so contented and purposeful he wished they were all dead. He thought of the way Aurora stood on half-toe when she wanted something, the sweet, terrible optimism in the girl’s walk when she headed down the hallway. He wanted to stop his car and rush out among the strangers and find a woman, proposition her, and have sex with her in an alley. He wanted to strip naked and run into the ocean. He wanted to drive his car into the glass windows of a restaurant and be put in jail. He drove back and forth down the main street for a while, hands trembling on the steering wheel.

He turned the car and roared toward where people knew him best: the studio. At 11:00 AM, he walked through the doors and stood in the shadows, watching. Eight contestants were white-lit, hitting buzzers, shouting out answers to questions, and the producers and crew were scrambling noisily in the dark around the stage.

Lenny stared at the brilliant stage set. On this stage, he had seen parents allow their children to walk them on a leash, like dogs, for five hundred bucks. He had seen teens who agreed to twerk in front of their grandparents for a thousand. He had stood in this brightness, watching others fall dimly around him.

“Lenny,” he heard. “Hey, Lenny—”

Now he stood in this corridor, a strange, familiar fear in his mouth. He knew what would be unbearable.

He turned around several times before he saw the exit. Pushing the metal doors, he ran into the parking lot, jumped into his car, and drove home.

When the Ferrari drove up to the mansion, Aurora was sitting on the stairs. The girl was still, as though she had been sitting there for a hundred years. Her blue eyes were fixed on Lenny as he began to walk up the stairs.

“I thought you weren’t coming back,” said Aurora.

“I had to do an errand,” said Lenny.

He sat beside Aurora on the stair.

“I have a new plot idea,” she said. “To help Yabonda.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her paper towel feet have dried out,” she said. “Whenever she lifts her feet, they make a weird crackling sound. Everyone on the planet wants her to go away. They can’t stand the noise her feet make. It keeps them all awake. There is mayhem and murder.” She looked right at him; her gaze was stern. “She meets Glungluck, a kindly alien who was kicked off her planet because her ears, which resemble long straws, suck up everything around them, and people were losing their purses and keys.”