They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel

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136 S It was my fourth time in a year giving blood and I wanted to shake a finger at people I passed on the street, people who passed the sign shouting blood needed in red letters. I don’t even like doing it, and the headache afterward lasts days. But people are dying, I should have announced. The blood drive was too timid about it. I’d read that in Fallujah men had lined up to donate, not wanting to wait and so sticking the needles in themselves and pumping their fists. The Americans had just begun the siege of the city. After I’ve donated I take a pastry and sit in the lobby. I should hurry back to work but today I don’t care, I don’t see why everyone there isn’t here with me. I have to remind them: I leave notes on the refrigerator and bring it up too often. While around me in the lobby are a middle-aged woman in a pantsuit with shoulder pads, an old man, too old, I’d have thought. Two teenage girls looking pale, arms linked, drinking Hi-C. Why? I want to ask them all. Who have you lost? 137 Maybe no one, maybe it’s just an idea of something good. On TV they see doctors hanging the bags, shouting, gurneys barreling, all that. Those men, pumping their fists. Most of that blood would have been wasted. During the siege there was almost no electricity, doctors worked by flashlight and cigarette lighter. They ran hot water over bags of blood to thaw them. The blood had been in the fridge where they used to keep lunches. How long does it take blood to spoil?—I don’t know this; I should. The teenage girls poked at each other’s Band-Aids. Shiny silver. I’d been given a plain one. I didn’t want to go back to work, to lunchtime, the other women sitting around that table. This whole week the TV in the corner of the break room had been playing the same clip again and again: a new terrorist statement, according to the news. The terrorist’s face appeared in the background, his beard, his calm hollowed eyes, his musical language, tripping up the throat lightly like a stream over stones, like the sound of a gun cocking. I’ve never heard a gun do this, only on TV. The translation scrolled across the bottom of the screen. I can’t believe they haven’t caught him, someone said, All these years, and there he is, looking so smug. He didn’t look smug to me. His words sounded like the caves where they used to say he was. Round syllables one could slip into, then that harsh close in the throat, a dark wall in the back. I liked to hear it. I had always meant to learn it. If I’d learned it I could have gone to that country. I wanted to correct the women in the lunchroom, I wanted to leave notes on the refrigerator or folded into their lunch bags. The number of ambulances turned back from a checkpoint that 138 day. How long between when a hospital ran out of antibiotics and more arrived. How do you clear the throat of vomit without electricity? My phone was buzzing. Work, wondering would I be back soon. A patient was asking for me, they said. I got up, started the walk back in the sun. My head throbbed. You gave blood? one of the volunteers asked when I got back to the shelter. Aren’t you good, she said. I shrugged. ...