I can fell an edible crow with a blowgun or drop a hefty vulture with a boomerang. I can practically start a fire under water. Ha-ha. Additionally I can handle .50-caliber machine guns, crush a villain’s trachea, or knife him through the heart even though I don’t like seeing people get hurt.

Hen Pierson sits in the geri chair across from my own. He was a diabetic at twelve and has been on dialysis nineteen years interspersed with two short-lived transplants. His albumin-creatinine ratio (ACR) at 3.4 is better than my own.

Hen is sixty-four. His brother was thrown in prison for murder, and while he sat many a long year in his death-row cell, the weight of his crimes weighed heavily upon him. Hen asked his brother for a kidney but his brother wrote back, “Why should I give you a kidney? Nobody ever gave me anything worth having.”

A week later Convict Pierson, age fifty-seven, was stabbed to death in the prison infirmary. Madame Rosa said she knew this was going to happen. “It was plain as day.”

She said she was glad it happened. I think her lumbago puts her in a bad mood sometimes. She is not a mean person. I have seen her read the Bible from time to time.

Hen came to treatment looking pretty down after the incident at the prison. He wanted the kidney, sure, but he loved his brother and he was always loaning him money or paying off lawyers, money he could have spent on himself.

He was wearing a suit that looked three sizes too big on him. He removed his jacket and rolled up the sleeve of his left arm, exposing his arterial fistula.

The dialysis technicians were coming down the line, hooking everyone up, but when they got to Hen’s chair, I heard a terrible scuffling of shoes against the tile as Hen stumbled out of his chair and started to fall. The clinic nurse hurried down the aisle and helped him gain his balance. “Are you okay, Mr. Pierson?”

Hen’s face was white with fear. “I’m done,” he said. “I’m just going to go home.”

The long room fell dead with silence. When Hen realized he was the center of attention, he tried to put a good face on things and said, “I want to thank everyone for being a pal for so many years. I sincerely wish you all the best.”