The Decanting
Spenser bleeding out in the white room, thinking about his father’s funeral. Nine years ago, to the very day. All the curious echoes and vague symmetries that make up a life.
And all the different shades lurking within. When the lab technician pricked the end of his middle finger with folkloric precision in the small grey room to test his hemoglobin, the bead of blood was electric red. She daubed the blood with a cotton ball and tossed the cotton ball in a waste basket. In the basket was a heap of the day’s castings, which all appeared gibbous to Spenser’s eye, the old blood dark as loam and crusty. But now that he is pierced and hooked up, the plastic bag leeching away below his right elbow is the richest of purples. Not storybook red but the colour of abattoirs and switchblades to the throat in midnight alleyways. The unctuous liquor of my body. The claret satchel looks impossibly cold as it slowly fills, sucking at him with tender rapacity.
The needlebite vanished even as Spenser became fully alert to it, like birdsong at midnight. Something about the needle’s sting amplifies the syrupy slackness that oozes through his body as he settles into the oversized recliner. Dreamy lassitude as his lifeforce drains away. A completely new sensation. He is drifting. Is this the siren’s caress that the addict hunts?
Spenser flexes his fingers a few times, as he was told to do.
He thinks about medieval phlebotomists, leaning over a patient and flaying a forearm under guttering lamplight. Bloodletting as purgation, purification, full body reset. He understands it all now.
Sanguine the day and sanguine his thoughts. Part of him already picturing himself walking out the front door with his head up, chest puffed, feeling proud of the good work he has done this day. Giving himself away to help another human being he will never meet. Is this what it means to be truly selfless, leaving this room with less of your self? And where will he end up? His identity will be scrubbed and transformed into a barcode that he imagines being scanned in a chilled basement before it is rushed to a frantic operating room. Car crash victim. External hemorrhage. Goddamn it, I need suction over here. Maybe a farming accident, problem with the disc mower on the back of the tractor, or even just someone careless with a scythe. Whatever the case, the femoral artery has been nicked and they need help fast. Something quieter perhaps. A leukemia patient receiving a transfusion, curled up with her back to the door so Spenser can’t picture her face, just the stubble of her head, the arc of her spine, the drape of the thin blue gown.
The weirdness of all this. Dozens and dozens of the most serious of questions related to sexual partners, diseases, surgeries, prescriptions, fevers, dental work, travel. Was your mother born in Mexico or South America? Have you paid for, or received, money for sexual acts? Have you recently handled monkeys or their bodily fluids? Tap your answers on the touchscreen, proceed to the small grey room, then the white room, recline and bleed, then hunch over a plastic table and eat miniature cookies and sip juice boxes beside complete strangers.
He flexes his fingers, clutching at an invisible hand.
In the end they didn’t bury his father. Turns out he wanted to be cremated. How does a child not know this of his parent? How does this wish survive a lifetime unspoken to a son? His old man didn’t want to molder in some dank box, the black pressing in on him from all sides, forever. Perpetual decay. Death everlasting. No, it was bright lights and heat for him. The absolute finality of fire and ash. Cast my atoms to the wind, let them scatter where they may. If some speck of me finds its way into the hot pink lungs of another living thing, does that not mean some tiny part of me lives forever? Did his father actually think in these terms, starseeds and the limits of eternity?
When he gets home he removes the gauze from his inner arm. He straightens his arm and flexes his hand and a bauble of blood wells up from the pinhole in the crease of his skin. He washes the arm as he was directed, sees the palest pink traces of himself coil down the sink. Paler, paler still, then gone. And whither the father and whither these droplets, and might they find each other once more?
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