In a 2008 report, the doctors explained that three patients had been euthanased between 2005 and 2007. . . .

At the time of writing the article, the doctors were enthusiastic about the potential for organ donation in countries where euthanasia is legal. . . .

The curious thing about this is how little publicity this has received, even though the Belgian doctors published their achievement in the world’s leading journal of transplant surgery. ~ Transplantation, July 15, 2006; Transplantation, July 27, 2008.

Full article is available at:

http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/8991/

21 - Lev

It’s a very rare thing that a clapper doesn’t clap, because by the time one gets to the stage of being willing to make one’s own blood explosive enough to take out a whole building, that soul is far beyond the point of no return.

There had still been a spark of light in Levi Jedediah Calder, however. Enough to ignite a powerful change of heart.

The clapper who didn’t clap.

It made him famous. His face was known nationwide and beyond. WHY, LEV, WHY? magazine headlines read, with his life story spread out like a centerfold, ready to be ogled and gobbled by a world greedy for dirt and personal tragedy.

“He was always the perfect son,” his parents were quoted as saying more than once. “We’ll never understand it.” To see their teary interviews, you’d think Lev had actually blown himself up and truly was dead. Well, maybe in a way he was, because the Levi Calder he had been on the day he was sent to be tithed no longer existed.

Almost a year after his capture at Happy Jack Harvest Camp, Lev sits in a detention center rec room on a rainy Sunday morning. He is not a resident of the detention center; he’s a visitor on a mission of mercy.

Across from him sits a kid in an orange jumpsuit, his arms crossed. Between them are the sorry ruins of a jigsaw puzzle left from the last person to sit at the table, one of many unfinished projects that plague this place. It’s February, and the walls are halfheartedly hung with Valentine’s Day decorations that are supposed to add a sense of festivity but just seem sadistic, because in an all-boys’ detention center, only a select few are finding romance this year.

“So you’re supposed to have something useful to say to me?” the kid in the orange jumpsuit says, all attitude, tattoos, and body odor. “What are you, like, twelve?”

“Actually, I’m fourteen.”

The kid smirks. “Well, good for you. Now get out of my sight. I don’t need spiritual guidance from baby Jesus.” Then he reaches out and flicks up Lev’s hair, which, over the past year, has grown to his shoulders in a very Jesus-like way.

Lev is not bothered. He gets this all the time. “We still have half an hour. Maybe we should talk about why you’re in here.”

“I’m in here because I got caught,” the punk says. Then his eyes narrow, and he takes a closer look at Lev. “You look familiar. Do I know you?”

Lev doesn’t answer. “I would guess you’re sixteen, right? You’re labeled a ‘divisional risk,’ you know that, don’t you? It means you’re at risk for being unwound.”

“What, you think my mother would unwind me? She wouldn’t dare. Who’d pay her friggin’ bills?” Then he rolls up a sleeve, revealing that the tattoos visible on his wrists go all the way up to his shoulder. Bones and brutality painted on his flesh. “Besides, who’s gonna want these arms?”

“You’d be surprised,” Lev tells him. “People actually pay extra for ink as good as yours.”

The punk is taken aback by the thought, then studies Lev again. “Are you sure I don’t know you? You live here in Cleveland?”

Lev sighs. “You don’t know me, you just know of me.”

Another moment, then the punk’s eyes go wide with recognition. “No way! You’re that tithe kid! I mean the clapper! I mean the one who didn’t blow up! You were all over the news!”

“Right. But we’re not here to talk about me.”

Suddenly the punk seems like a different kid. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m sorry I was an ass before. So, like, why aren’t you in jail?”

“Plea bargain. Not allowed to talk about it,” Lev tells him. “Let’s just say talking to you is part of my punishment.”

“Damn!” says the kid, grinning. “They give you a penthouse suite, too?”

“Seriously, I’m not allowed to talk about it . . . but I can listen to anything you want to tell me.”

“Well, all right. I mean, if you really wanna hear it.”

And then the kid launches into a confessional life story that he probably never told anyone before. It’s the one positive thing about Lev’s notoriety—it gets him respect among those who usually don’t give it.

These kids in detention always want to know all about him, but the terms of the settlement were very clear. With so much sympathy from some people, and so much anger from others, it was “in the public’s best interest” to get Lev out of the news as quickly as possible and keep him from becoming the national voice against unwinding. In the end, he was sentenced to house arrest, complete with a tracking chip embedded in his shoulder, and 520 hours of community service every year, until his eighteenth birthday. His service consisted of picking up trash in local parks and ministering to wayward youth about the ills of drugs and violent behavior. In return for the relative lightness of his sentence, he agreed to give them all the inside information he knew about clappers and other terrorist activities. That part was easy—he knew very little beyond his own clapper cell, and the other members were all dead. He was also put under a permanent gag order. He could never speak in public about unwinding, tithing, and what happened at Happy Jack. He was basically sentenced to disappear.

“We should call you the little mermaid,” his brother Marcus had joked, “because they let you magically walk, in exchange for your voice.”

So now every Sunday, Pastor Dan picks Lev up at Marcus’s town house, and they share their own brand of spirituality with kids in juvenile detention.

At first it was painfully awkward, but within a few months Lev became very good at reaching into the hearts of strangers, figuring out what made them tick, and then defusing them before the tick became a countdown.

“The Lord works in mischievous ways,” Pastor Dan once told him, taking an old adage and giving it a necessary tweak. If Lev has any heroes, they would be Pastor Dan and his brother Marcus. Marcus not just for standing up to their parents, but also for going the distance and taking Lev in, even though it got him cut off entirely from their family. They were both outcasts now from a family so rigid in their beliefs that they’d rather pretend Marcus and Lev were dead than face the choices the two had made.

“It’s their loss,” Marcus often tells Lev, but he can’t say it without looking away to hide the sorrow it makes him feel.

As for Pastor Dan, he’s a hero to Lev for having the courage to lose his convictions without losing his faith. “I still believe in God,” Pastor Dan told him, “just not a God who condones human tithing.” And in tears, Lev asked if he could believe in that God too, never having realized he had such a choice.

Dan, who no one but Lev calls “Pastor” anymore, listed himself as a nondenominational cleric on the form they had to fill out before they began meeting with kids at the detention center.

“So then what religion are we?” Lev asks him each week as they walk in. The question has become a running joke, and each time Pastor Dan has another answer.

“We’re Pentupcostal because we’re sick of all the hypocrisy.”

“We’re Clueish, because we finally got a clue.”

“We’re PresbyPterodactyl, because we’re making this whole thing fly against all reason.”

But Lev’s favorite was, “We’re Leviathan, because what happened to you, Lev, is at the heart of it all.”

It made him feel both terribly uncomfortable and also a little bit blessed to be at the core of a spiritual movement, even if it was only a movement of two.

“Isn’t a leviathan a big, ugly monster?” he pointed out.

“Yes,” said Pastor Dan, “so let’s hope you never become one.”

Lev is never going to become a big anything. The reason why he doesn’t quite look fourteen is more than just looking young for his age. In the weeks after his capture, he endured transfusion after transfusion to clean out his blood, but poisoning his body with explosive compounds had damaged him. For weeks Lev’s body was bound in puffy cotton gauze like a mummy, yet with arms stretched wide to keep him from detonating himself.

“You’ve been cruci-fluffed,” Pastor Dan told him. At the time, Lev didn’t find it very funny.

His doctor tried to mask his disdain for Lev by hiding it behind a cold, clinical demeanor.

“Even when we purge your system of the chemicals,” the doctor said, “they’ll take their toll.” Then he’d chuckled bitterly. “You’ll live, but you’ll never be unwound. You have just enough damage to your organs to make them useless to anybody but you.”

The damage also stunted his growth, as well as his physical development. Now Lev’s body is perpetually trapped at the age of thirteen. The wage of being a clapper who doesn’t clap. The only thing that will still grow is his hair—and he made a conscious decision that he would just let it grow, never again becoming the clean-cut, easily manipulated boy he had once been.

Luckily, the worst predictions didn’t come true. He was told he would have permanent tremors in his hands and a slur in his speech. Didn’t happen. He was told that his muscles would atrophy and he’d become increasingly weak. Didn’t happen. In fact, regular exercise, while it hasn’t bulked him up like some, has left him with fairly normal muscle tone. True, he’ll never be the boy he could have been—but then, he would never have been that boy anyway. He would have been unwound. All things considered, this is a better option.

And he doesn’t mind spending his Sundays talking to kids who, once upon a time, he would have been afraid of.

“Dude,” the tattooed punk whispers, leaning over the rec room table and pushing some stray puzzle pieces to the floor. “Just tell me—what was it like at harvest camp?”

Lev looks up, catching a security camera trained on the table. There’s one trained on every table, every conversation. In this way, it’s not all that different from harvest camp.

“Like I said, I can’t talk about it,” Lev tells him. “But trust me, you want to stay clean till seventeen, because you don’t want to find out.”

“I hear ya,” says the punk. “Clean till seventeen—that oughta be the motto.” And he leans back, looking at Lev with the kind of admiration Lev doesn’t feel he’s earned.

When visiting hours are over, Lev leaves with his former pastor.