“We haven’t got all night, you know,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Luke, biting his lip as he pushed a vacuum-filled test tube up into the plastic sheath that covered the bottom of the needle. Inside the sheath was the sharpened back end of the needle, and they could all hear a dull popping sound as it broke the vacuum in the tube. Beatrice watched, fascinated, as Bonnie’s living blood beat into the tube. She imagined herself in Bonnie’s place, imagined Luke’s sure fingers caressing the crook of her arm. She stood closer to him and pretended that the growing erection that shamed and disturbed him was inspired by her. He pulled out the needle and pressed a pad of gauze against the wound.
“You big smoothie,” said Bonnie. “I didn’t even notice.”
“That’s the idea,” said Luke. “Who wants to draw me?” He hoped it would be Bonnie, but she was absorbed by her own blood, holding the tube up to the fluorescent light from the ceiling and swirling the contents.
“Sit down, Luke,” said Otto. “I’ll take care of you.”
Otto put on a pair of extra-large gloves and proceeded to draw Luke’s blood. He used a new needle, but Luke almost wished Otto would use the same one he had used on Bonnie. That would be a certain type of closeness, he thought.
Olivia came up behind them with Denis just in time to observe the penetration. As she watched Otto execute a flawless phlebotomy procedure, she imagined him, with his swollen muscles and great strength, driving the needle straight through Luke’s arm and out the other side.
“You’re getting good at this, Otto,” she said, patting him on the back. She left her arm resting on the back of his shoulder and felt the subtle workings in the great muscle as he switched tubes, then finished the draw.
“Thanks,” he said. He drew her next, then Denis. It was something of a thrill to watch Denis roll up his sleeve and expose the vein that stood out in bold relief all the way down his arm. As he felt the vein under his thumb, he imagined his own heart beating in exact time with Denis’s, then had a vision of their two bodies, especially their chests, pressed up against each other, and both of them marveling at the synchronicity of their hearts as they held each other.
When he was finished, Otto sat down and tried to roll up his sleeve, but he could only get it as far as his upper forearm. Beyond that, his arm was too thick for the cuff, so he was forced to remove his shirt. Beatrice stood by Denis as he performed the draw, and admired the pattern of black hair that spread from Otto’s belly up his abdomen, over his chest, and under his arms. It looked soft and well cared for, as if he used expensive shampoo on it instead of soap.
Olivia admired it, too, fiercely, and pictured her face against it, and even went so far as to position herself next to Otto to see if she could catch a scent from under his elevated arm. Bonnie found herself appreciative of the flat lines of Otto’s stomach, and the wide stretch of his chest, and especially the thick, winglike extension of the muscles along his sides. Luke watched Bonnie watching Otto, and envied him. Denis thought solely of his jumping lady.
He thought of her lying in the OR, perhaps already opened up, and prayed silently that her operation would come off without any complications. Beatrice muttered a prayer of her own to thwart Denis’s: She prayed for a power outage or an incompetent anesthetist or that someone would drop the liver.
She waited a little longer in the lab, while Denis and Otto performed the analyses on all the blood, because she wanted to make sure her friends were healthy. It turned out that Luke’s iron level could have been higher and that Bonnie’s glucose was dreadfully low.
“Time for lunch!” Bonnie said when she learned this, and went to go find Denis to convince him to help her hunt down the traveling food cart. Luke watched her go, then picked up the phone, which had just begun to ring. He listened with a grave expression and said, “All right,” then hung up. He folded his arms across his chest and said to Olivia, who was busy entering results into the computer, “Transplant’s canceled. The jumping lady is dead.”
Beatrice, upon hearing this, did not stay to see Olivia’s reaction but made directly for the river. She was severely disappointed when she realized that she still could not pass over the bridge. She puzzled over this the whole way back to the hospital. She wondered, Will I be stuck here forever? She went looking for her body.
When she found it her questions were answered. It was still in the SICU, though now in a different room. Outside she saw a team of doctors arguing with each other. “What am I supposed to do with this liver?” one of them wanted to know.
Another doctor was interrogating Judy, who felt close to weeping with frustration. She repeated her story, that Beatrice had coded while she was brushing her hair.
“And who told you to go around brushing people on their hair?” a doctor asked her. He was from Iran. Judy had never liked him.
“For God’s sake, I was trying to be nice!” said Judy. “And if you don’t like that you can just go fuck yourself!” She turned and stormed away, damning the consequences of her outburst. As she ran out of the bay, Frank turned to a fellow nursing assistant and said, “The mouse roars.” Beatrice went and looked at her body.
This was not the first time that her body had experienced a spontaneous and universal shutdown of organ systems, but every other time somebody had revived it. Her body looked the same to Beatrice as it ever did, but she knew from the conversation around her that she was certifiably brain dead. Now machines gave her a semblance of life, keeping her unruined organs alive for transplant to someone else.
Beatrice turned away from her body and wandered out of the bay. It would be a while before they took her off the machine and began to remove her organs. There were blood tests to run, and the organ harvesting team would need to be roused from their beds. She went and found her liver, still waiting for her in the OR. It was the sole occupant of the room. She went and looked at it where it lay in a volume of pale pink fluid that was not blood. But the whole thing reeked so strongly of blood that she thought she might faint.
Be happy, liver, she said to it, and went back up to the pathology lab because she wanted to spend her last hours at the hospital among friends.
Halfway back to the lab she heard music and followed it. It took her downstairs, through many different hallways, always sounding very close because the acoustics in this part of the hospital were strange. It was not unusual for a stray groan to come floating down the hall to disturb a candystriper on some innocuous mission.
The music led her to the third-floor balcony over the atrium, where she looked down and saw Bonnie playing on the big piano while Denis sat glumly beside her. Bonnie played sprightly in a high octave and sang:
Fingers are fun,
Toes are nice,
Brains are soft
And gray like mice
But blood is best.
Yes blood is the best,
Oh blood is the best,
Even your mama will tell you
That blood is the best because
Blood is the sum of our parts.
She stopped singing but continued to play softly. “My mother the nurse taught me that song. A crazy lady in housekeeping taught it to her. She — the housekeeper, not my mother — got fired for slurping clotted blood out of used specimen tubes. Said it tasted like oysters.” Bonnie was trying to amuse Denis because he was so sad. When she went back to ask him to lunch, he was just putting down his phone. He stood frozen over his machines for a moment, then burst violently into tears. For a moment Bonnie was uncertain what to do, but then she ran to him and threw her arms around him, saying, “It’s okay, Denis,” which was the first thing she could think of.