Giving

Emmy had first heard about Swaps from a woman she’d been talking to online since the spring, right around the time she’d begun fantasizing about removing as many organs from herself as she could without dying. She couldn’t go a few minutes without flashes of her insides jumbling together like groceries in a paper bag. She wanted to get rid of them. But she also wanted to live, so she was in a bind. Emmy finally committed to a Swap, and scheduled her procedure. It would take place at a private home outside Valencia, near where Interstate 5 turns into the Grape Vine. Scorched hills ribboning endlessly into the horizon.

A surgeon could charge an unfathomable amount for a Swap, even for the donor. Not that cost was an issue for Emmy. She could pay without thinking twice. Her mother’s family was San Francisco Rich. Old San Francisco, not tech San Francisco. “Vaguely oil,” Emmy would say. Eventually it would come up, so Emmy tried to keep it casual and quick. A minor revelation. She knew it was better than pretending to not be rich. That was a humiliation worse than death. Those were Emmy’s two rules when it came to her wealth: don’t pretend to not be rich, and don’t pretend to care too much about things that will never effect you; only care enough that people see that you’re caring at all. Emmy had a trust fund and a dumb job at one of the big streaming studios in Los Angeles. She was fairly nice to most people, and got invited to a lot of weddings. She was single and fine with it. More ambivalent than fine.

Emmy was ambivalent about most things. She grew up not caring much about her body. Not in a destructive way, but in a way that made her feel like she existed but also didn’t. It was an easy line to straddle. Most of her girl friends (and a few guy friends) had eating disorders growing up, but Emmy never did. She was on the swim team and ran track. She ate enough to train, and when it came time to compete, cut back. Once when Emmy was dress shopping with her mom for her senior prom, her mom her hands on both of Emmy’s shoulders, like she was trying to push her together, and told her swimming made her shoulders broad.

“You look like cereal box,” her mom had said.

The sales associate who was standing nearby shot eyes over to Emmy, to let her know she had also heard that. Emmy felt obligated to be upset over the comment. She complained to some friends about it, who assured her she looked amazing. For a few days, she tried skipping meals, loudly not eating front of her mom. But she didn’t notice. And Emmy realized she also didn’t care, so she stopped not eating and went back to not feeling one way or the other.

Emmy couldn’t pinpoint a specific time when she started wishing aways her insides, though. Maybe in the last two years. A lot happened in that time. The first cases of The Big Sad in the US had been reported. Only a few dozen to start, and now, twenty months later, 10 million; 70% were people under the age of 45. The story was the same with every infection: night sweats, a dry cough, then fatigue—mild at first, but eventually so debilitating you couldn’t leave your bed. You’d rebound after a week, but the exhaustion would remain. Insomnia would follow, and creeping depression—preexisting or not. A crisp, droning malaise that would become deafening. Hundreds of thousands opted for indefinite remote employment. Others quit their jobs en masse. Parents took their sick children out of school; wealthy parents moved theirs to the country, hoping it would torch the pathogen. It didn’t. Crime skyrocketed. So did suicides. And divorce.

The CDC and World Health Organization were no closer to understanding what it was or how it spread than anyone else. Almost half of the country believed it was a hoax. A third thought it was a new form of Lyme Disease or something related to climate change. Some psychologists believed it was mass psychosis, birthed on social media. In the beginning, it was called “The TikTok Flu;” hundreds, then thousands, of teenagers and twenty-somethings documenting strange and identical symptoms on the platform. Then it was everywhere.

Swaps began nearly a year into epidemic: people willingly traded their organs for money—usually one who’d been disbarred or was hard up for cash. Afflicted people paid healthy people for their organs in hopes of being cured. Some claim it worked but it was never verified. After a searing exposé in the New York Times, the government was forced to acknowledge that Swaps were, indeed, real, and swiftly banned the procedure. It fell into a black market reserved for desperate rich people and deep kink. Some even paid to have the organs of the sick put into them, longing to be part of the crisis. It wasn’t about any of those things for Emmy. She just wanted to clear herself out.

Emmy’s first brush with The Big Sad came when she still lived in New York. A guy she was seeing at the time woke her up in a panic, thinking he’d wet his bed with her in it. They were out at a birthday party that night, and he was doing cocaine and drinking beers, so it was possible. Emmy tried not to laugh as she helped him change the sheets. He apologized profusely, then started laughing, too. Eventually, they realized it was just sweat, and chalked it up to partying. But it happened again. The next few times Emmy spent the night, she woke up in the morning drenched. The last time she ever saw him, Emmy woke up right before dawn to him crying at the edge of his bed. The bed was soaked. He turned to her—half his face shadowed, the other half lit up by a terrible light from the alley outside his window. In the shock of fluorescence, Emmy saw how tired he looked. She pictured him as a mummy, and suddenly felt afraid for the first time in a while.

“I feel like I can’t escape,” he said to her, exploding through sobs.

Emmy didn’t ask what he meant. He didn’t explain.

A month later he moved home with his parents in Albany, and soon he leapt headfirst off a gorge to his death. It wasn’t long before Emmy knew nine other people in New York with the Sad. She left before Christmas and returned to California.

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