Things to keep in mind:
The secret of Schenectady.
I’m not sure about this, but I’ve got Oblique Strategies loaded into my Twitter feed, and this afternoon when I happened to look up it was saying “Give the game away.” So.
When we first moved to Portland we lived in a house up on Northeast Killingsworth and we had no money. So we did various things. Barry and Sarah transcribed the voicemail messages people left about shoes. The Spouse cleaned newly built houses that were subsequently condemned. I—well, I managed a phone bank. (That’s not the game. Be patient.) Charles delivered pizzas. And at one time or another most of us sold plasma.
Barry and the Spouse went multiple times, to raise money for Photoshop and a wedding dress. I only ever went the once. It was a place in Old Town on the bus mall, back when the Pearl District was nothing but redrawn maps and marketing collateral: a jackleg clinic tucked behind an empty storefront with dingy windows and a sunfaded logo: Alpha Therapeutics. (I may be extemporizing some color in that. It was a whiles ago, after all, and we all have our Romantic tendencies. —I also remember bright fluorescent lights and gleaming clean silvery steel implements, but this is the furniture my mind supplies when I think of “clinic,” and is as well untrustworthy. Some middle ground, perhaps?)
You went inside and checked in and filled out paperwork and attested to various things about your medical history and were given a jug and led through the plasmapharesis room to the first available nice brown couch with a complicatedly comfortable headrest and long padded armrests. The jug was—was it plastic? Glass? Pyrex? I don’t remember it being heavy on the way in, but I do remember worrying about dropping it and breaking it on the way out, but I wasn’t exactly in my right mind then. But I do recall it was hashed down the side with lines denoting milliliters and such.
They helped you lie down on the nice brown couch and get that complicated headrest right enough so you could watch the movie that was playing on the TV screens that hung from the ceiling without lifting your head and then they stuck a silver needle in your arm that was attached to a clear plastic tube that went through some pump apparatus and then they hooked the other end of the tube into the neck of the jug. And then your blood is pumped out of your arm through the tube into the apparatus—but what’s pumped into the jug isn’t blood-colored at all. It’s just water and various proteins. Your blood cells are sent back into your arm.
I didn’t really watch that part. I watched the movie. Jim Carrey. The Mask. I remember wondering just how they managed to get Cameron Diaz’ skirt so short. CGI, I figured.
They tell you you really shouldn’t feel anything, but I got colder as it went on.
They had to tell me I was done. The gauze was already on my arm and the movie was something else. I got up off the couch and nearly fell over. They gave me the jug and it was—warm. And I walked out of the plasmapharesis room and up to the front counter with this jug full of something that had been inside me, that had been me, that was still warmed by heat leeched out of me, and I put the jug on the front counter, and I got a good look at it—
“Straw-colored” is the common epithet. Milky white. Thinly viscous. Frothy at the top, slicked with tiny oily bubbles. A hint of warm yellow gold.
And they gave me an envelope full of cash and took the jug away into the back room and I shivered all the way home on the bus. —In some respects it was the most honest job I’ve ever had. You could go back up to twice a week, I think, but I never did.
Now the thing about Schenectady is there’s a post office box. You write to it, the price is still two bucks (content, the king, is cheap), and you remember your SASE, and you get back an idea neatly typed up on a single page of onionskin paper. But the thing about Schenectady is this: it was a couple of years after that trip to Alpha before I ever started wandering about the city at all hours figuring out how the first glimmers of this and that bit of the City of Roses I’d found typed up on that single sheet of onionskin would work. And it was a couple of years after that before I ever started writing the story down for reals. And it was a couple of years after that, over a year or so ago, in the fallow period between nos. 5 and 6, when I found myself thinking of, heck, remembering that weird trip to Alpha for the first time in a very long time, and the weight of that jug of myself—and that’s when I figured out where that one part of the idea’d really come from—
See, Schenectady cheats.
(And it was only a few months ago—I never said I was the sharpest knife in the drawer—that I figured out the implications of why it is the plasma’s the color that it is, what’s there, and what isn’t, and when I sussed it all out I started to laugh. Schenectady cheats, but you always get your money’s worth.)
—posted 5576 days ago
