The Great Dyeing

Not a boom, not a bang, a slow steadily marching blink of twenty-thousand years. Stepping on red sand dunes toward boiling oceans, lightning strikes licking at the shore. Clap. Snap. It’s all wiped out.

Have a seat, please. Now look son I’m not gonna beat ‘round the bush. Gotta let you go, t’s-jus not gonna work.

Out the door at five, won’t work there anymore and I’m so fucking lost, barely got enough to eat for the month how the fuck am I gonna make rent?! I just need a minute to think. I just need to figure this out, I’ll be alright. Oh, I just need a drink.

So I got one and I walked, walked and I walked in between murals of shipwrecks and flat acrylic dive suits heavy as bricks with fishbowl heads. Scuttling through South Bay sands, swimming in my drunken thoughts towards the white lighthouse. Spinning slowly cutting through the marine layer mists, murks in my head above and below the water.

The sun is getting low. I’m under a life-size blue whale painted on an outer wall of aquarium complex. Back gate’s open. It must be Friday. During the summer, and only on Friday nights, the garden is “open and free to the public.'' Walking through the wrought iron, I’ve lived here ‘bout six years now, never been inside. A flood of children push around me from behind, rushing to a still pool wrapped around the garden. Pouring their hands in to pet small-mouthed sharks and spotted ray fish. The Jimmy Buffet cover band plays:

“Can't you feel 'em circlin', honey? Can't you feel 'em swimmin' around? You got fins to the left, fins to the right, And you're the only bait in town.”

Around the corner tucked away there’s another tank that reeks and it’s filled with horseshoe crabs. They sit there still as death fourteen in four meters and six inches of water.

“But now she feels like a remora With the school still close at hand Just behind the reef are the big white teeth Of the sharks that can swim on the land”

The attendant, she’s leaning over the tank from the backside. A couple of bored parents staring blankly back at her.

“Now these little guys are real special and they’re super important to you and me! N’they’re REEAAALL old too. They’ve survived hundreds of millions of years through what’s called the Great Dying a bigger extinction event than even the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Ninety-Seven percent of all life in the oceans died out two-hundred-and-fifty million years ago. We don’t have any fossil fuels from before then because volcanoes burned em all up into the atmosphere. These little buggers were one of the few species to survive! N’it’s all ‘cos of their blood. They’re tough with super immune systems, n’we synthesize their plasma for a protein called LAL it’s used to check for all sortsa bad stuff in everything doctors use to inject us. Does anyone have any questions!?”

Nobody moves.

Ping! Ah, ya almost got it that time! I just need a little more luck. Playin’ horseshoes, summer camp. Dead ringer stand-in, drip. Drip. Leaky filter, drip. Wet hands, drip. Clang! Mine for theirs, blues and reds dripping into the ocean drawing sharks to shore.

I keep seeing Facebook ads for Biomat. Wide nets trawling the ocean floor for bottom feeders, sifting out the ones and the zeros, searching for those who might be convinced. Cash crops, Cha-ching! Two hundred dollars a month to donate, and I mean sell, sell now profits are going up, plasma. Twice a week. Well shit, I got nothing left that’ll go a long way. Getting in the car at ten we rattled towards Bellflower over black tectonic plates, cracked pavement. Deep-sea seated tremors shiver my hands, white knuckle cold, bloodless crab claws gripping the wheel. It stretches, and stretches, out to the warehouse park. Sputtering and stuttering to a stop.

Stumbling to a stop inside, away from the heat to an air-conditioned waiting room. To the woman behind the reception desk.

Hi. I u-um here to donate plasma.

First time or returning? She doesn’t look up from the computer.

First time.

Name? Ugh. Just give me your driver's license. Fill out this form and have a seat over there. We’ll call you for the initial exam when we’re ready. Thank-you. She says with a sneer.

Tick tock tick tock

Name?

Age?

Ethnicity?

Are you feeling healthy and well today?

Taking any medication for infection?

Have you reviewed the risk poster?

Had acupuncture?

Received during surgery someone else’s bone or skin?

Have you ever had sex with someone from Africa?

Had sexual contact with anyone you know to be HIV positive?

Had sex with anyone who takes money or drugs as payment for sex?

Males: Have you ever had sex with another male?

Females: Have you ever had sex with a male who has had sex with another male?

Recent Tattoos or body piercings?

Been in juvenile detention, prison or jail for more than 72 consecutive hours?

Do you receive money or drugs as payment for sex?

*Questions take from Grifols Pharmaceuticals New Donor Form, USA/UK/EU/AUS

Questions, sifting, sorting censoring the blood pool. Deciding who has value to them and how much, or little they can payout. Did I lie, maybe a little? I think they expect that though.

A soft tap, light and cold on my shoulder.

Follow me, please. Into a locked room with a single bed and a box of white nitrile gloves.

Undress and lie down.

All the way?

She sighs. Everything.

Buttons and zippers slipping undone and the cold air raises goosebumps across arms and legs. Lowering myself to spill out across the pale blue plasticine sheet.

Three fingers on two hands probing my diaphragm and intestines, checking for hemorrhages, tracing my forearms for injection scars and sores still open. Pushing, prodding for proof of other wounds in the carapace. Injury or malformation means that the subject isn’t fit to be drained or donate for compensation. But I am’n’ain’t that just dandy.

Sorry about the cold. She says on her way out the door. Go to the desk they’ll check your hydration levels there.

So I do and they do. A thumb-sized green and white click to prick my fingertip of the tube thin like a needle that sucks up the drop on my skin. Red racing up to the line marked three-quarters of the way down and just barely meeting minimum tide heights.

Alright take a number and wait in the lobby.

The room is almost full but there’s a seat being left now, space in the refrigeration stacks before the machines get hooked up.

Eyes on the aquamarine linoleum tiles with the little lighter flecks. Easy to clean, easy to replace. Still in the silence, heartbeat fills my eardrums. Crawling up to the shore while the tiles slide away from under me, seafoam retreating faster than it should, faster than I’d ever seen. Making the sand underneath, unstable, unusable, unable to keep my balance I’m sinking. I never saw it the wave breaking behind, towering twice the height of my falling form. Before it starts to break and bear down.

HEY! LOO-

Hey! I told you, man, you aren’t allowed in here anymore!

Oh, c'mon man I-

No, you’ve been told you can’t donate anymore!

I really need thi-

Get out!

The security guard with the taser on his hip picked up the man who’d staggered in strung out skin stretched tight across dehydrated bones after the water slammed him on the sand. A couple of people shake their heads and mutter.

Stupid ass.

Shoulda been looking out the waves are high today. Number 34! 34! ...34!

That’s me, Standing up on shaky legs in the surf. I guess I pass the looky-loo tests and questionnaires. Shifting eyes behind shatterproof glass watch for tricks and trades among the livestock. Sailors on the shore gnashing their gold teeth to catch the lead shot sliding under corporate shells. Which one is gonna pay us off? Coulda switched names, shells in the game, to sneak a profit. Swindling the swindlers and sneaks as they saw it. Not the starving and scared. Switching tags to make a buck, swapping blues for reds passed through the machine. It's all the same sifting out plasma, fluids in between.

Between the second set of double doors following the second security guard. Getting colder as we go together, deeper into the facility, deeper into the ocean, sunlight doesn’t quite reach to warm the backs of shells down here.

Smells of iodine and astringent fill the room and the aqua tiles lead into a larger space with a low wall around part of the middle, making a pen with ten rows of ten chairs with dialysis machines for each. The ones I’d seen disappear during my wait are laid out with the others I never saw before. With tubes in their lefts and rights. I’m a Left or what’s left, well that’s what they’d say, see my veins are better in that arm. Guided to a chair, told to lay back while technicians in white push little carts around jangling glass bottles and clipboards. A minute passes and a man, White coveralls and short-cropped hair stops next to me. Paused for a moment to read over the chart.

He places a dark blue pleather block under my arm and slides the pressure cuff halfway up my bicep. The machine kicks to life in response to a button press. Double-checking how much I can be bled before the damage done means I can’t be re-released and the product isn’t viable.

Pushing the needle out of the sterile package and connecting it to clear tubing and the other end to a nozzle on the machine. Crook of my elbow is swabbed and stained orange with iodine.

He missed three times, can’t quite catch the vein, still too slippery with sea muck slithering away under my skin. Leaving little bubbling holes on the beach. Years later I’ve still got little pock scars in both my arms, barely noticeable now. Net drags up from the bottom and he finally catches, pressure equalizing on the way up decompression sickness or something like that, I’m a bit dizzy, but my head stopped swimming.

There. We. Go.

He places one of his glass bottles under the spout, under everything. Another little tube in the top, an almost airtight seal.

Now hold this: and when the pressure increases on the cuff you need to squeeze your fist tight and fast repeatedly and don’t stop until the band is deflated.

He pushes away and the grip tightens and I follow his instructions pumping my fist hard and fast and watching the dark red rush out in great gouts running down the rubber till it connects. Like a 7-11 slushie machine, the chambers start to spin. Minutes creep by before the cuff starts to pulse fuller again and a thin stream that’s yellow like piss dribbles into the bottle below foaming around the edges.

Drip. Drip back into the filter. Dripping to the drink.

Across the racks: rows of horseshoes with backs bent for needles inserted between the plates where the lumbar vertebrae might be.

Glass bottles and open tubes, drip drip drip.

[Check stations four, Thirty-four and Seventy-Two]

I didn’t even notice my pump had stalled with a little red blinking light on top. Blink drip blink blink, a little buzz each time. A shellfish in a grey sweatsuit vomits and falls off its perch. Seventy-two I think, further from me and my blinking light. Three pushcarts pushed out from the hive to each station and one of the security guards in black comes back through the doors.

The man in white he’s back eyes tracing my tubings. Another unhooks the cracked crab with a wet sucking sound. The machine still tries to drink up more blood as they’re ushered through a door off to the side I didn’t notice before and I won’t see again until I leave. I can’t turn my head far enough to see number four.

My technician found the problem or didn’t, don’t really know but he flicked a switch and we’re off again.

A darker, slower crawl back up, inching towards my arm the choke let loose creeping into me. It’s uncomfortable, the tightness in my veins. Sludge sliding back in but not quite enough air to breathe. Water at the bottom holds less oxygen so I should be okay, at least that’s what the risk poster and dive warnings say.

The tide of blood flows in and out and out and inside me again while the bottle slowly fills. Cycling over and over again and again and again, my hands and feet are going numb and I can feel everything slowing, slowing. Slowing. Drifting off, under cold blanket drifting out.

Ding! Lights on!

The spinners stopped. Creaking wheels of a cart spinning to a stop. First things first he’s gotta check the product. Seems okay. Six hundred pale blue centiliters SOLD to the highest bidder at ten thousand dollars a pop. Pop, uncorking mine from the spigot. Not quite blue at all and not quite worth as much.

Stay seated please we aren’t done yet.

What’s that?

Eyeing the bag he pulled out of an icebox.

A saline solution. You’ve lost a lot of fluids and if you’re gonna come back we need you to be fully saturated. He shrugs. It helps clean the equipment too.

Hangs the bag up and runs the IV into the machine and it starts to whir one more time and it flows faster into me pink to a frosted clear.

It’s sharp, I thought I was cold before, a light tickling on my skin. But this, but this is something else I can feel the chill spreading inside me and it fucking hurts. Invading me bit by bit, seizing-up tight. Cold of the ocean as I’m slipping back under the waves, it hits in waves. Heavy as hands to choke. So long unaware of my own vascular systems, but now, but now, I can feel every fucking vein and artery turning into ice tunnels and hardened sea caves. Stabbing at my joints, hands, and feet even numb-er by the second. And freezing my heart-stopping valves or at least that what it feels like. The bags half empty now.

Sitting there drowning under the internal pressure, that’s it, it’s pressure. I’ve got too much inside unacclimated to surface weather systems. I need out, outside away from this. Animal reactions to uncomfortableness I haven’t felt before.

That’s it.

Oh, he’s back? The bags empty or almost.

Pulling the tubes out tucking them into hazard bins hanging off the edge of his trolley. Pushing cotton wad into the area just above the needle he pulls out with his other hand and wraps me up to prevent excess bleeding it’s valuable stuff now shame to lose any of it to the sand.

Head over to the window with this form to collect your payment.

The window, it’s bulletproof glass with the wires running through it, in the office behind is empty with a spinning chair. Ring the call bell: a woman enters from the other side. Sitting down with a few clicks and clacks a slot opens at the bottom and I pass the form through.

No sign it first then you can give it to me.

Ohh, Kay.

And I did as told I didn’t uh read it though.

It doesn’t matter really, here. She passes back through a blank envelope.

Inside is your payment card, a list of ATMs in town that you can use, otherwise it acts like a preloaded debit card. If the funds aren’t used within thirty days Biomat retains the right to reclaim any compensation. Head to your left through that door just over there.

Wait? What? She’s already gone.

So here I am standing there numb and cold not quite steady and not quite ready to swim to the door. The door, that door, it’s the same one security went through with the one that got ill. Wading through the hallway seems like it’s taking so much longer than it should, I’m sluggish and feel really weak.

I am not my own, I am un-owned, I am kept busy, I am kept separate, blood bag, money sack, not-crustacean bottom-feeder. I made it, leaning on the door with all my weight it creaks open. An automated voice chimes:

Thank you and see you soon!