Golden Blood

Steve Norris

Signs around the parking lot advertised the temporary occupation of the Mobile Blood Donation Unit. The nurse led my husband and me to comfy leather chairs in the tow-behind trailer. It felt like the trailer a movie star might inhabit, only full of blood sacks.

“It’s her first time,” my husband said to the nurse, as if we were dining at a hip new restaurant. 

The nurse manufactured a quick smile and set to work. I offered my arm but looked away when she approached with the glistening needle. The queasiness I felt during flu shots and other vaccinations returned, but magnified. Thick and warm, the blood left me. Vomit gurgled in the back of my throat as she put my bag with the others. This would be my last time giving blood, I hoped. They couldn’t need it that bad. 

When it was all over, my husband turned to me, crumbling cookie in hand, already half-eaten.

“Beat’s work, right?” 

I felt a swell of indignation at his question. I had been laid off two months prior from my corporate desk job. I had no leads. My husband, I was sure, thought it might give me some direction to donate. I had said yes. I was here for him. If I couldn’t give money to our little family unit, I would give what I could, even blood. 

Two days after the blood donation, I got a call from a random number. I waited for the voicemail, where a panicked voice said it was urgent I call back. They mentioned some mega hospital conglomerate and emphasized the need to get in touch ASAP. I ignored the call. Clearly something was wrong, something I did not want to know about. 

Then three hours later, the first caller’s manager left a voicemail and asked that I please consider them for all future blood donations and that they would be happy to make special arrangements and by the end of the voicemail the desperation was palpable. 

I mentioned both to my husband as he got home from work. 

He shrugged, door to the fridge fully open as he sipped from the bottle of bone broth from the farmers’ market. He was a strange guy. 

“Maybe you’ve got some magic blood or something.”

He took another swig. 

“Pick up next time though,” he said. “See what they want.” 

The third call, the one that sealed it, was from the CEO of the largest hospital chain in the country. He called me personally. Clearly explained over the phone that my blood was rare. They wanted to make me a proposition and would be willing to fly me out, to put me up in a hotel. 

“We would be lucky if one in a million people had your blood,” he said. “It’s more like one in half a billion, or not far off. As far as we’re aware, you’re the only person in this country with your blood.” 

I was always getting talked into things I didn’t want to do, both altruistic and not. In college I was afraid of drinking, yet my dorm friends had convinced me to go to a party at a small brick house tucked down the hill from the political science building. Drunken students poured in and out, like ants to spilled cake. It was not that I felt unsafe — it was that I was drinking too much, too fast, to feel anything. Stumbling around, motor skills abandoned, that little house was where I met my husband. A guy, standing alone, smiling at me. I drunkenly smiled back. We started talking. I got the spins. He got me some water. I stumbled away to go find my friends but it was as if he was standing in my way. He was too large, I couldn’t maneuver around him. Then came the vomit. My friends found me there in the bushes, with him, rubbing my back. 

My husband faked the flu and took Thursday and Friday off work. He hated his job as much as I ever had. 

The hospital chain emailed us first class plane tickets and a reservation to a boutique hotel, surely paid for by the surgeries of dozens of sick people. In a sterile meeting room, the CEO and his smiling secretary with hair so rigid it seemed constructed and the company’s Chief Legal Counsel, a brittle woman who looked about a hundred, sat across from us.

“Do you know what antigens are?” the CEO asked. 

I shook my head. My husband did too. 

“Blood — deviously — needs to be compatible. Blood transfused with the wrong antigens will alert the immune system. The body will attack the blood as a foreign agent.” He looked at the brittle lawyer. “I’m not out of line with this explanation, right?”

“Don’t go too much deeper and don’t make any claims of expertise.”

He shot her a thumbs up. 

“Now. Why are we here? Why did we fly you out? Because your blood,” the CEO said, “doesn’t have specific antigens. That makes it quite rare. We call it golden blood. Now don’t worry, it’s the same color as everyone else’s.” He gave me an avuncular wink. “Your blood is one of the rarest liquids in the world. O negative gets all the hype, but that’s nothing compared to yours. Every blood bank in the country has O negative. I could bore you with talk of the Rhesus factor—” 

“Reese’s?” my husband asked. 

“Rhesus,” the CEO agreed. “Sort of the red-headed step child of the antigen world. I don’t really understand it myself, so just know that it means you should never ride on a motorcycle or do any dangerous activities. That’s how rare your blood is. And we want it. Bad.” 

Then came the offer. With a salesman’s grin, he said they would pay me a salary, full health insurance, if I sat down and gave my blood on a regular basis. He told me they’d buy my groceries and pay for my medications so that I could give the maximum amount of blood possible. 

“Only as much blood as is safe,” the Chief Legal Counsel said. It sounded like hearing an asterisk spoken. 

“I read that I need to wait eight weeks between donations.” I had done my research, though it now seemed pointless. Their offer was worth more than my health. 

“That’s very cautious,” the Chief Legal Counsel said. “We believe that with proper medical care — which we will provide — you can give much more frequently.” 

I looked to my husband for confirmation and saw hunger in his eyes. He had the same salesman’s grin as the CEO. 

“I’ll take care of you,” he said. He said it over and over again as he ran his hand over my back.

I signed one hundred and thirteen forms. They even made my husband sign a few. Then a few more for me. By the end the tendons in my wrist were like rusty wires. 

The CEO took us out to dinner and got drunk and started to cry about how much this country meant to him. My husband got drunk and started talking about his favorite board games. When I tried to order a beer, the Chief Legal Counsel Officer coughed and noted that I had agreed not to drink alcohol, as part of our agreement. When I went to order a soda, she cut in and asked the waiter if there was high fructose corn syrup in the soda. When the waiter nodded, she waved that away too. When I attempted to order a sparkling water, she cut in and told the waiter that the water on the table would be fine.  

“Microplastics, you know,” she said. Then with a brighter smile: “All in the name of health!” 

Even though I had yet to see a paycheck, we ordered a new dishwasher. My husband had insisted it would be fine. He drew up an updated budget based on our new income. 

“A couple years of this and maybe we can both quit our jobs,” my husband said. 

We had an okay marriage. Would I have done it all over again? Who would? 

The following Monday morning, I arrived at the hospital at 7:45 AM. I didn’t want to be late for my one task at the new job. I navigated the labyrinthine hospital and, after thirteen minutes, I finally found the room where they would siphon off my life force. 

Seated in a plasticky chair, a material easy to wipe of bodily fluids, I waited as a nurse took my blood. This time I didn’t feel scared. I had a purpose. After it was over, the needle and tube tossed in a hazmat trash can, the nurse handed me an oaty, unsweetened muffin with visible bits of carrot. I ate it happily. Another nurse asked if I felt okay. I told her I did. Both nurses smiled down at me and insisted I stay and recover my strength before heading out. One pulled out her phone and put on some New Age music that was surely meant to be calming but carried a grating metal sound. 

When I went to donate for the third time, I ran late. My husband insisted on making waffles when I told him that the only thing I wanted in the world was a bowl of oatmeal. 

I put my foot down.

“I’m not eating waffles. I’ll make my own oatmeal, I don’t care.” 

“Let me take care of you,” he said. “You need an extra big breakfast.” 

“I’m eating oats!” I said. I repeated this over and over.  

He ended up making oats for both of us. I left annoyed. En route to the hospital, only five minutes after I was supposed to arrive, I received a call from the CEO’s secretary. 

“Where are you?” Her voice carried urgency, as though I had missed a meeting with my parole officer and was subject to arrest. 

I assured her I was in the car, on the way. 

Her voice turned saccharine sweet. 

“Ama-zing,” she sang. 

The fifth week, things turned. The lightheaded, post-donation feeling didn’t go away. A hospital chauffeur drove me back home in a 12-passenger van, empty besides myself. I slept all day on the couch. Nine hours later, I woke up to my husband insisting I eat something. He looked concerned but not worried, which at that moment, I realized I needed. I was worried. I needed that feeling shared. 

“It’s only the fifth week,” I said. 

“It’s still the first month,” he said. 

“Not technically.” 

He thought about it. “It’s basically still the first month.” 

I wanted to throw something at him. 

“Give it time,” he said. 

Right there on the couch, I went back to sleep. 

As the weeks went by, I felt like a drowning person in the ocean, pummeled by massive waves — I had barely survived the last and yet the next was already bearing down.   

I called my new personal physician — the Chief Legal Counsel had given me no name, no office, only a phone number — to see if a week off would be beneficial. 

A man’s voice answered. “This is Dr. Hudson.” 

Dr. Hudson briefly listened to my concerns about the pace of donations, the feeling that my skin was too heavy and that my muscle and bone were deteriorated, and immediately put me on hold. He called back seven minutes later. 

“So,” he said, “your care team and I actually think it would be wise if you donated again next week. If the same thing happens, then definitely, we’ll find some time off.” 

It was like my hand was on a hot stove and I couldn’t remove it. 

“My care team?” I said. I pictured the CEO dictating how and when my blood was taken. 

He paused. “My fellow physicians, I mean.” 

He was lying. I knew he was lying. 

“It feels like I will die.” 

He paused. “Call me after the next donation.” 

I was nervous to tell my husband about the exchange. Two years prior, I had texted him that I was getting a migraine, and he used it as an excuse to leave work so that he could come home and take care of me. He did give me backrubs anytime he thought I looked stressed, though usually I just wanted to be left alone. Sometimes I wondered if he loved taking care of me more than he actually loved me. As we ate our New York strips of steak, provided by the hospital with the insistence that I eat more red meat, I felt it impossible not to tell him. 

“Hm,” my husband said. He sounded just like the doctor. 

“What?”

“It sounds like the doctors and experts all think it’s safe to give.”

I felt lightheaded all of a sudden. 

“I feel like I’m dying.”

“But they said you’re not?” 

“Aren’t I the expert here?”

“Right, right,” he said, unconvinced. 

“What? You think I’m not?”

“Remember last year how you thought there was something wrong with you?”

“I felt weird all the time!”

“And the doctors just said you were short on Vitamin D.” 

This felt unfair. “So I was right! Something was wrong! And what if I had been unwell?”

“But you weren’t.”

“I might be now! These guys have no incentive to stop!”

“Babe,” he said, in a voice I hated, “they’re surely not thinking so short-term that they want you to die for one week’s worth of blood.”

I realized then that I had no idea what their incentives were. I had no idea why they were going all this length to drain me of my blood. What was it worth? A few months ago, it was the same blood as anyone else. How could I predict their actions if I had no idea what drove them? 

Nothing made sense. 

As I tucked under the covers, I couldn’t stop shaking. At first I thought it was another sign of illness but then I realized I was shaking with anger. 

From then on, I resisted, in my own small ways. On Sunday afternoon, my husband left the house to play frisbee. I drove to the gas station a few minutes away and bought the largest chocolate bar I could find. I ate it right there in the aisle and paid for the empty wrapper. I walked out feeling more alive than ever before, the chocolate more revitalizing than all the farm fresh food. 

I hit Monday still feeling like I was a papercut away from the end. A car picked me up for my donation, as though worried I’d crash on the way home. In the seat, a handwritten card from the CEO — You got this, rockstar! Dan Bartlett. Of course I felt like death after my donation. They didn’t even drive me home but admitted me to a dark room where a nurse took my vitals. My husband arrived after work. 

“It’s barely been a month,” I said. “I’m dying.”

He rubbed my leg. “Just rest.” 

“Is it really worth this?”

It took two days for them to let me go home. Even then, for the rest of the week, I dreamed about that dark room, about being locked in there. I lay in bed all week, watching movies. Partly by my doctor’s orders but mainly because I didn’t feel capable of anything else. I typed up a backlog of all the movies I wanted to see before I died and started to make my way through it. Then I typed up a list of all the books I wanted to read and realized I’d never get through it. No way. 

I watched Misery and as it played on the screen, my eyes flickered about and my ears heard but I didn’t feel anything. 

“Are you worried about me?” I asked my husband when he got home from work. He had the tired eyes he always had at 5:30 PM. His phone would go off constantly with pings from coworkers — at dinner, at the gym, even when we’re asleep. He said each ping feels like getting hit with a small hammer. 

He paused before answering my question. “I’m worried,” he said, “but I know the doctors are taking care of you.” 

“What if I die?”

“You won’t die. I won’t let you.” 

“You all want everything I have,” I said. “They want my blood. You want my soul.” 

“You want to quit?” he asked. 

“You don’t want me to?”

It took him a very long time to answer the question. 

“I don’t want you to quit if you don’t have to,” he said. He said the words with the trepidation of someone walking through a rotted house where the floorboards could give out with any step.

“It sounds like you don’t want me to quit.”

“This money could change our lives! Even a few months of it. You don’t have a backup job. We could be in a worse place without this.” 

“You could talk me into jumping off a bridge if you wanted to,” I said. 

He smiled and strode toward me and started to rub my back. 

“Maybe your body is just adapting,” he said. 

I wanted to ask how one adapted to bleeding out but didn’t. 

The hospital sent me home with a walker after the next donation and said to keep it around just in case. I took to using it most days. My skin was still too loose and heavy, but now it felt like I could pull it off in doughy clumps from an uncooked loaf of bread. 

Why did they want to kill me? What was worth my death? That became my obsession as I lay on the couch, almost completely immobile. I pictured a billionaire using my blood to stay young, his appointment right after mine, the blood still warm in the bag as they pumped it into his right bicep. Fresh and energized, he would proceed to a YouTube livestream to extol the benefits of clean living. 

One evening, napping on the couch, I woke up to my husband speaking softly on the phone. 

“What could it be worth?” he asked. 

I held my breath trying to hear but he was listening to the other end. 

“Who was that?” I asked. 

“Just your doctor. He wanted to hear how you were doing.” 

I didn’t have the energy to ask more questions. My brain felt like putty gummed to the side of my head. I held my mouth open, hoping the right words would fall out. 

“What?” he asked. 

“I want to be ok,” I said. “I want to be ok.” 

“You’re going to be ok, baby.” 

“Am I?” 

He waved me away with a smile. “You need rest.” 

My head throbbed with the effort of talking to him. I wanted to fight back more. I couldn’t phrase my argument. So I held my mouth open as if to catch a thought that I could regurgitate back. 

My husband just patted my hair. 

“You’re adorable,” he said. “Have I told you that lately?” 

The next day, when the mail arrived, I felt a spike of energy. A growing paranoia had filled me — what plans was my husband making after my demise? The way he thought about money, I was sure that he had taken out life insurance for me. Was it possible he had conspired with the doctors to sign off on a policy? I hobbled my walker to the front door, out into the yard, to the mailbox. I tore through the mail right there and wept. Only junk mailers. My mind was slipping out with my blood. Thinking felt impossible. 

Back inside, I tore through the pantry and pulled out white flour and the last bits of sugar I could find. I mixed in some organic butter. No chocolate chips but I scavenged some cranberries from a high shelf. 

My husband came home a half hour later. The smell of freshly baked cookies filled his face with horror. 

“What are you doing?” He was screaming. 

I screamed back at him. “Living! I am living!” 

Then everything tilted left then right. It looked like the counter was about to fly up and hit me. As I fell, I leaned toward the living room but crashed on the floor like a bookshelf that had been pushed over. My husband ran over and carried me to the couch. 

He fanned my face and brought me water. When he asked if he should call an ambulance, I waved him away. I had no interest in returning to the hospital. 

He made me soup. 

“I want out.” Tears fell down my face as my husband spooned the soup into my mouth. “Please let me quit.” As I said those words, I realized it was his decision and not mine. It had always been his decision. 

“I won’t let them kill you,” my husband said. “You know that, right?”

“But they are killing me!” 

Even my tears felt too thin. 

My husband didn’t have many friends. Me, his only friend, would be gone. I never found out how my husband had arrived at the party the night we met. He didn’t seem to be there with anyone and for years I carried this worry that he had been the type of person to wander campus at night, looking for crowds of drunk students and open doors to be invited into. 

I was disappointed that I was still alive after my next donation. Through the last few months, they had dried the marrow out of my bones. It was as though my very heart itched and I could not scratch it. 

I did not faint but could not speak for several minutes after. They brought me a new walker and guided me to the front of the hospital, where my husband waited. I hadn’t asked him to come. 

“I got work off,” he said. “I figure taking care of you is the most important thing I can do right now.” 

He smiled as if this was the best news. 

I nodded. 

Two days later, when I felt I could form a thought again, I waited until my husband was at work and I called the first lawyer I could find. Tears fell as I struggled to explain my situation. 

“I’m trapped,” I said, “it’s a job and they’re taking my blood and I’m trapped.” 

“Pardon?” the voice on the other end said. I could tell by her tepid voice that I was speaking to a junior attorney or an intern or whomever took calls at the front desk. 

“I need to escape my job.” 

“Do you live here in town? This is a right-to-work state.”

“But the contract,” I said. 

“Send it to us,” she said. 

I searched my email but I could find nothing. They had had me sign the forms but never provided me with the evidence of what I signed. I had no idea how to get it. My husband would not help. He would not let me escape. 

I woke on Friday a little after 9 AM, hours after I used to wake up. In my previous life, I had risen early before work and made coffee and exercised and read the New York Times. Now I could barely tell the difference between waking and sleep. 

I feared that I only had 72 hours left to live. Monday morning might as well have been an appointment with the gallows. I spent the morning searching online for information about golden blood, why they could possibly want it. I found nothing helpful. 

I had lost touch with all my friends. My parents were dead. I had to save myself. 

With the little thought power I had left, I made an escape. I gathered some snack bars I found in the pantry, put on a light coat, despite the warming weather, and I ventured outside. With each step, my walker scraped against the ground. Lactic acid gathered in my arms and legs, like I was on a long run. Push on, I thought. I made it halfway down the block before I had to sit on the curb. I wanted to slap myself. Keep going. Keep going! I grunted with each step and made it three more houses and then lowered myself into the lawn of someone’s house. The grass was cool upon my face, brushing and calming. I breathed deep and smelled earth. 

“Oh dear,” someone said. 

“She has cancer,” another voice said. “Her husband told me.” 

I opened my eyes. Two neighbors were standing above me, a septuagenarian couple who loved fireworks. 

“Let’s get you home, dear,” the first one said. 

I tried to struggle and resist but their strong arms scooped me up as if their hydro gymnastics classes had trained them for this very scenario. They guided me back up the block to my front door. 

I started to cry. 

“There, there, dear,” one said. “Keep fighting it!” 

I lay down on the couch in a fog and didn’t wake for hours. 

Another Monday morning. Another donation. At a geriatric pace, I hobbled into the hospital, down the now familiar path, past a million white ceiling tiles, and when I was seated in the small recliner, the nurse stuck me with the needle and my blood crept out the tube. Then I felt the walls spin. Perception stopped. I was surprised that it took me that long to lose consciousness. When I came to, I was back in the dark room, somewhere in the bowels of the hospital, on stiff cotton sheets in a hospital gown. The air smelled sterile but musty. 

It felt like the end. Either they would let me stop or I would die. But this current thing could not continue. I decided to escape when night came, until I realized that here, with no windows, with no natural light, I did not know the time. My phone was gone. So were the clothes I’d worn that morning. 

I would get out. I would escape this place. I would leave this life behind and start a new one, far away. My plan was to wait for the nurse to check on me. Surely that restarted some sort of timer and would allow me the most amount of time to escape.

But instead of a nurse, three men entered. They hovered over me. A doctor. The CEO. My husband.

“How’s our patient doing?” the doctor asked. I recognized his voice from the phone call. The same doctor who told me to keep going. 

“I want out,” I said. “I’m done.” 

But none of them seemed to hear me. They were talking over me. Laughing. 

I focused directly on my husband, looking dead into his eyes, so he would know I was talking to him and him alone. 

“I’m done!” I screamed. 

He crouched down and grinned at me. The expression on his face made me feel drained of all blood. I remembered, in a jolt, that when we met, I had wanted to escape the party, to be anywhere else. Too drunk to flee, a trace of vomit on my shirt, I tried to settle for being alone. Yet from nowhere, he had appeared. He had stuck to me. 

“Haven’t I always taken care of you?” he asked.