Life Expectancy

don't."
        Soldiering on, Lorrie said, "The dialyzer contains thousands of tiny fibers through which the blood passes."
        "I usually don't like black people," he informed us, "but she seemed
        *
        nice enough."
        "And there's a solution, a cleansing fluid," Lorrie continued, "that carries away the wastes and excess salts."
        "She's quite a tub, though," Punchinello said. "The amount of food she must pack away each day, you gotta wonder if she ate that baby instead of burying it."
        Lorrie closed her eyes. Took deep breaths. Then: "It's very rare, but sometimes the dialysis patient is allergic to one or more of the chemicals in the cleansing solution."
        "I'm not prejudiced against black people. They should have equal rights and everything. I just don't like the way they aren't white."
        "The dialysate, the cleansing solution, contains a number of chemicals.
        Only the most minute quantities of those chemicals ever return to the body with the blood, infinitesimal amounts that are usually harmless."
        Punchinello said, "I don't like the way their palms are pale and the tops of their hands dark. The soles of their feet are pale, too. It's like they're wearing badly made black-person disguises that weren't too well thought out."
        "If the doctor prescribes a dialysate that isn't working as well as it ought to," Lorrie explained, "or if the patient is sensitive to it, the formula can be adjusted."
        "One of the ways I know the world is wrong," he said, "is black people being in it. The design would be more convincing if everyone was white."
        Perhaps without realizing it, he had come as close as he might ever get to admitting that he thought the world was merely a stage, an illusion crafted to deceive him, and that he himself was the only piece of good design in it.
        Lorrie looked at me, her face placid but her eyes feverish with frustration. I nodded to encourage her.
        By the minute I saw less chance of reaching him, but if we gave up, Annie had no hope at all.
        "Once in a great while, hardly ever," Lorrie said, "a dialysis patient is so violently allergic to even the most minute quantities of an array of chemicals essential to dialysates that no adjusted formula will work for her. The allergic reactions grow worse each time until she's at risk of anaphylactic shock."
        "Well, Jesus, give her one of your kidneys, why don't you?" he asked.
        "You have to be an acceptable match for her."
        "Thanks to your father," she reminded him, "I only have one."
        To me, he said, "Then one of yours."
        "I'd have been on the operating table already if I could," I told him.
        "When they tested me to do a transplant compatibility profile, they discovered I have hem angiomas of both kidneys." "You're going to die, too?"
        "Hemangiomas are benign tumors. You can live with them all your life, but they make me unsuitable as a donor."
        The last thing Grandpa Josef had said on his deathbed was Kidneys! Why should kidneys be so damned important? It's absurd, it's all absurd'.
        My father thought that my grandfather at the end lapsed back into incoherence, that those last words were of no importance.
        We know what the poet William Cowper would say about that if he hadn't died back there in 1800.
        In addition to waxing on about God's mysterious ways, Old Bill also wrote, Behind a frowning providence, God hides a smiling face.
        I had always believed the same. But lately there were times when, I must confess, I wondered if His smile was as screwy as some with which Punchinello had favored us.
        Now my murderous brother suggested, "Sign the kid up on a transplant list like everyone else does."
        "We could wait a year," Lorrie said, "maybe longer, to get a suitable match. Lucy and Andy are too young to donate."
        "A year isn't so long. I didn't get surgery for syndactyly until I was eight. Where were you then?"
        "You're not listening to me," Lorrie said tightly. "Annie has to be on dialysis in the meantime-but she can't be. I explained already."
        "I might not be a suitable match."
        "Almost certainly you will," I disagreed.
        "It'll be a head-in-the-bucket thing again," he predicted. "It always is."
        Trying to force an emotional connection between him and Annie, Lorrie said, "You're her