But until this moment, she had never felt so close to crumbling.
The prison nurse is not gentle as she ties the tourniquet around my right arm, snapping the latex like a rubber band. It pinches my skin and tears at my hairs, but she does not care; to her, I am just another malingerer who has roused her from her cot and interrupted her normally uneventful shift in the prison clinic. She is middle-aged, or at least she looks it, with puffy eyes and overplucked brows, and her breath smells like sleep and cigarettes. But she is a woman, and I stare at her neck, loose and wattled, as she bends over my arm to locate a good vein. I think of what lies beneath her crepey white skin. The carotid artery, pulsing with bright blood, and beside it, the jugular vein, swollen with its darker river of venous blood. I am intimately familiar with the anatomy of a woman’s neck, and I study hers, unattractive as it is.
My antecubital vein has plumped up, and she grunts in satisfaction. She opens an alcohol swab and wipes it across my skin. It is a careless and slovenly gesture, not what one expects from a medical professional, done out of habit and nothing more.
“You’ll feel a poke,” she announces.
I register the prick of the needle without flinching. She has hit the vein cleanly, and blood streams into the red-topped Vacutainer tube. I have worked with the blood of countless others, but never my own, so I stare at it with interest, noting that it is rich and dark, the color of black cherries.
The tube is nearly full. She pulls it from the Vacutainer needle and pops a second tube onto the needle. This tube is a purple-top, for a complete blood count. When this one, too, is filled, she pulls the needle from my vein, snaps the tourniquet loose, and jams a wad of cotton against the puncture site.
“Hold it,” she commands.
Helplessly I rattle the handcuff on my left wrist, which is fastened to the frame of the clinic cot. “I can’t,” I say in a defeated voice.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she sighs. No sympathy, just irritation. There are some who despise the weak, and she is one of them. Given absolute power, and a vulnerable subject, she could easily transform into the same sort of monsters who tortured jews in concentration camps. Cruelty is there beneath the surface, disguised by the white uniform and the name tag with R.N.
She glances at the guard. “Hold it,” she says.
He hesitates, then clamps his fingers against the cotton, pressing it to my skin. His reluctance to touch me is not because he’s afraid of any violence on my part; I have always been well behaved and polite, a model prisoner, and none of the guards fear me. No, it is my blood that makes him nervous. He sees red oozing into the cotton and imagines all sorts of microbial horrors swarming toward his fingers. He looks relieved when the nurse tears open a bandage and tapes the cotton wad in place. At once he goes to the sink and washes his hands with soap and water. I want to laugh at his terror of something as elemental as blood. Instead I lie motionless on the cot, my knees drawn up, my eyes closed, as I release an occasional whimper of distress.
The nurse leaves the room with the tubes of my blood, and the guard, his hands thoroughly washed, sits down in a chair to wait.
And wait.
What feels like hours goes by in that cold and sterile room. We hear nothing from the nurse; it’s as if she has abandoned us, forgotten us. The guard shifts in his chair, wondering what could be taking her so long.
I already know.
By now, the machine has completed its analysis of my blood, and she holds the results in her hand. The numbers alarm her. All concerns about a prisoner’s malingering have fled; she sees the evidence, there in the printout, that a dangerous infection rages in my body. That my complaint of abdominal pain is surely genuine. Although she has examined my belly, felt my muscles flinch, and heard me groan at her touch, she did not quite believe my symptoms. She has been a prison nurse too long, and experience has made her skeptical of inmates’ physical complaints. In her eyes we are all manipulators and con men, and our every symptom is just another pitch for drugs.
But a lab test is objective. The blood goes into the machine and a number comes out. She cannot ignore an alarming white blood cell count. And so she is surely on the telephone, consulting with the medical officer: “I have a prisoner here with severe abdominal pain. He does have bowel sounds, but his belly’s tender in the right lower quadrant. What really worries me is his white count…”
The door opens, and I hear the squeak of the nurse’s shoes on the linoleum. When she addresses me, there is none of that sneering tone she’d used earlier. Now she is civil, even respectful. She knows she is dealing with a seriously ill man and if anything should happen to me she will be held responsible. Suddenly I am not an object of contempt but a time bomb that could destroy her career. And she has already delayed too long.
“We’re going to transfer you to the hospital,” she says, and looks at the guard. “He needs to be moved immediately. ”
“Shattuck?” he asks, referring to the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital Correctional Unit in Boston.
“No, that’s too far away. He can’t wait that long. I’ve arranged a transfer to Fitchburg Hospital.” There is urgency in her voice, and the guard now glances at me with concern.
“So what’s wrong with him?” he asks.
“It could be a ruptured appendix. I’ve got the paperwork all ready, and I’ve called the Fitchburg E.R. He’ll have to go by ambulance.”
“Aw, shit. Then I gotta ride with him. How long’s this gonna take?”
“He’ll probably be admitted. I think he needs surgery. ”
The guard glances at his watch. He is thinking about the end of his shift and whether someone will show up in time to relieve him at the hospital. He is not thinking about me but about the details of his own schedule, his own life. I am merely a complication.
The nurse folds a bundle of papers and slips them into an envelope. She hands this to the guard. “This is for the Fitchburg E.R. Be sure the doctor gets it.”
“It’s gotta be by ambulance?”‘
“Yes.”
“Makes security a problem.”
She glances at me. My wrist is still handcuffed to the cot. I lie perfectly still, with my knees bent-the classic position of a patient suffering from excruciating peritonitis. “I wouldn’t worry too much about security. This one’s way too sick to put up a fight.”
SEVEN
Necrophilia,“ said Dr. Lawrence Zucker, ”or ‘love of the dead,’ has always been one of mankind’s dark secrets. The word comes from the Greek, but as far back as the days of the pharaohs there was evidence of its practice. A beautiful or high-ranking woman who died at that time was always kept from the embalmers until at least three days after her death. This was to ensure that her body wasn’t sexually abused by the men charged with preparing her for burial. Sexual abuse of the dead has been recorded throughout history. Even King Herod was said to have had sex with his wife for seven years after her death.“