Gone Girl

Rose explains, looking at me in the rearview.
    ‘Oh,’ I say. How else does one reply? Oh, those are awesome plasma days!
    ‘You’re allowed to give twice a week,’ says Maureen, the bells on her sweatshirt jingling. ‘The first time you get twenty dollars, the second time you get thirty. That’s why everyone’s in such a good mood today.’
    ‘You’ll love it,’ Vicky says. ‘Everyone just sits and chats, like a beauty salon.’
    Maureen squeezes my arm and says quietly, ‘I can’t give anymore, but I thought you could be my proxy. It might be a nice way for you to get some pin money – it’s good for a girl to have a little cash of her own.’
    I swallow a quick gust of anger: I used to have more than a little cash of my own, but I gave it to your son .
    A scrawny man in an undersize jean jacket hangs around the parking lot like a stray dog. Inside, though, the place is clean. Well lit, piney-smelling, with Christian posters on the wall, all doves and mist. But I know I can’t do it. Needles. Blood. I can’t do either. I don’t really have any other phobias, but those two are solid – I am the girl who swoons at a paper cut. Something about the opening of skin: peeling, slicing, piercing. During chemo with Maureen, I never looked when they put in the needle.
    ‘Hi, Cayleese!’ Maureen calls out as we enter, and a heavy black woman in a vaguely medical uniform calls back, ‘Hi there, Maureen! How you feeling?’
    ‘Oh, I’m fine, just fine – but how are you ?’
    ‘How long have you been doing this?’ I ask.
    ‘A while,’ Maureen says. ‘Cayleese is everyone’s favorite, she gets the needle in real smooth. Which was always good for me, because I have rollers.’ She proffers her forearm with its ropey blue veins. When I first met Mo, she was fat, but no more. It’s odd, she actually looks better fat. ‘See, try to put your finger on one.’
    I look around, hoping Cayleese is going to usher us in.
    ‘Go on, try.’
    I touch a fingertip to the vein and feel it roll out from under. A rush of heat overtakes me.
    ‘So, is this our new recruit?’ Cayleese asks, suddenly beside me. ‘Maureen brags on you all the time. So, we’ll need you to fill out some paperwork—’
    ‘I’m sorry, I can’t. I can’t do needles, I can’t do blood. I have a serious phobia. I literally can’t do it.’
    I realize I haven’t eaten today, and a wave of wooziness hits me. My neck feels weak.
    ‘Everything here is very hygienic, you’re in very good hands,’ Cayleese says.
    ‘No, it’s not that, truly. I’ve never given blood. My doctor gets angry at me because I can’t even handle a yearly blood test for, like, cholesterol.’
    Instead, we wait. It takes two hours, Vicky and Rose strapped to churning machines. Like they are being harvested. They’ve even been branded on their fingers, so they can’t give more than twice in a week anywhere – the marks show up under a purple light.
    ‘That’s the James Bond part,’ Vicky says, and they all giggle. Maureen hums the Bond theme song (I think), and Rose makes a gun with her fingers.
    ‘Can’t you old biddies keep it down for once?’ calls a white-haired woman four chairs down. She leans up over the reclined bodies of three oily men – green-blue tattoos on their arms, stubble on their chins, the kind of men I pictured donating plasma – and gives a finger wave with her loose arm.
    ‘Mary! I thought you were coming tomorrow!’
    ‘I was, but my unemployment doesn’t come for a week, and I was down to a box of cereal and a can of creamed corn!’
    They all laugh like near-starvation is amusing – this town is sometimes too much, so desperate and so in denial. I begin to feel ill, the sound of blood churning, the long plastic ribbons of blood coursing from bodies to machines, the people being, what, being farmed . Blood everywhere I look, out in the open, where blood isn’t supposed to be. Deep and dark, almost purple.
    I get up to go to the bathroom, throw cold water on my face. I take two steps and my ears close up, my vision pinholes, I feel my own heartbeat, my own blood, and as I fall, I say, ‘Oh. Sorry.’
    I barely remember the ride home. Maureen tucks me into bed, a glass of apple juice, a bowl of soup, at the bedside. We try to call Nick. Go says he’s not at The Bar, and he doesn’t pick up his cell.
    The man disappears.
    ‘He was like that as a boy too – he’s a wanderer,’ Maureen says. ‘Worst thing you