Bloodshed

Jessica Joiner

Sometimes I get stuck in a loop.  A feeling or thought sticks with me; I obsess.  Everything becomes a part of the obsession.  It titters in the back of my head, as though a canary (the kind you lower into mineshafts to test for poisoned air) has burrowed its way into my brainstem, and lingers there, persistently and incomprehensibly chirping.  Everything new that I see confirms its wordless droning.  I start to sense that I am circling a drain, that with each experience weight is added and I pick up momentum.  I also sense that the drain I’m circling is nonexistent, or that it’s too far away for the relief of finally dropping into the hole and stopping the continual buildup to be expected any time soon.  It seems impossible that the circling descent could continue, that another occurrence wouldn’t be enough to serve as a catalyst, but it always does. 

The other day it rained.  In opening my umbrella the flesh at the base of my thumb was pinched and cut.  I looked at the gap in the skin and waited for the blood to come but there was none.  I curled the hand in on itself to protect it and remembered a chemistry teacher who had spoken about inflammation the other day.  Swelling, redness; the mind’s reaction to tissue damage.  I looked back at the spot; it looked purplish red now, and wrinkled and puffy and old.  I pushed against the skin imagining I could feel fluids sloshing underneath it.  I looked into the hole, pulled its edges apart briefly to look inside.  I checked it periodically on my way to class, a few minutes after the wound was formed clear liquid started to seep from it and I wondered what it could be.  Had my cells been crushed like olives and were these their juices draining?  Was that cytoplasm trailing down my thumb?  Moments after there was liquid there was the blood, not as much as I had thought there might be, but it slid across my palm and stained the fingers that accidently brushed against it during class all the same.

I woke the other day to discover that my period had begun during the night.  This had happened before, but this time there seemed to be an unusual amount of blood and it was early, unexpected.  I considered what my biology teacher had said about mutation, that most are too extreme to sustain life, they die before the organism carrying it ever realizes it’s pregnant.  I entertain the notion for a moment that I had conceived miraculously, and that my DNA was too incompatible with whatever inseminating force was behind the event for anything to come of it.  I wonder in a depressed way what would have happened in the Immaculate Conception should the laws of biology been applied and Mary’s DNA been found inconsistent with whatever it was that makes up God.  But then wasn’t she supposedly different, pure and without sin, something like that.  I just remember that it worked for her because she wasn’t like the rest of us.  Which means, of course, that we are decidedly not holy and considerably less than pure, which is certainly no revelation.  I keep finding evidence of that night in unexpected places, I must have gotten blood on my hand, I must have touched things in my confusion in the dark. 

My school’s website has a link to CNN.com for international/world news.  I usually prefer to ignore the news on Iraq, I was keenly interested in politics in high school but that world seems increasingly pointless as time goes on.  Slowly I’ve begun to stop caring, to stop clicking the links that will lead to a hundred stories that boil down to the same thing; the death, the bodies, the misinterpreted statistics, but larger than that the essentially hopeless and hypocritical nature of the entire struggle, of all struggles.  In the article “Horrors rampant in city ‘full of sorrow’” an artist “…in a sleek gray shirt and spiked heels…” has made an abstract painting that represents the pain of Bagdad life for the past five years.  It is of scattered body parts and is shown in a picture at the top of the page as she holds in up while “…in a sleek gray shirt and spiked heels…” and while not looking like she knows much about that sorrow at all.  On the left is the “Don’t Miss” column.  Don’t miss “Heads, bodies found in northern Iraq” it says, don’t miss the article below it, “Surge cuts down violence in Iraq”.  

             In the article “Agent: Hussein was surprised U.S. invaded” an FBI official is quoted as saying that the WMDs, a topic rarely discussed nowadays despite it being a large factor in the invasion itself, were a bluff to keep Iran from re-invading Iraq.  Don’t miss “Former Hussein official’s family stabbed to death” the column to the left cries.  Don’t miss “Iraq to host Iran leader”, be sure to check out “POWs alleging Iraqi torture appeal to White House”, it should interest you the column says, you’re reading that so you should read this it tells me.  The “We Recommend” column on the right says that it chooses “stories you may be interested in based on past browsing”, but they’re all about Obama and Clinton, and I know I’ve never opened a story about them.  Maybe they think that if I read the depressing stories then I’ll want the 411 on the people who are going to change all that, who are going to implement the new programs so that there won’t be any more “Heads, bodies found in northern Iraq”.  It seems naïve that a dealer in misfortune would believe that one of its consumers would want the solution to the things he or she reads about, but perhaps the dealer knows about the bitter and hopeless cycle of politics as well as the consumer does and realizes that it offers no solution, that “Clinton, Obama come out swinging in debate” is someone else’s “Horrors Rampant in city ‘full of sorrow’”.

While feeding the microorganisms in my biology experiment I noticed one had died since I saw him last.  I removed him from his container with a pipette; I didn’t want his rotting body to harm the others.  When I looked up from the tub of zooplankton I saw on the counter in the back of the room a jar full of unborn kittens, dead now.  One’s paws, claws and pads already formed, were covering his eyes.  It was at that moment that I realized that the entire back wall of the room I was standing alone in was covered in jarred animal specimens.  Fish, sharks, cats, lobsters, crabs, and their respective parts; containers of fish heads, tails, fins, of skeletons; unidentifiable, white, cartilaginous, with filmy bits floating in the water surrounding them.  But worst of all there were no individually inhabited jars; bodies were stuffed in with five other bodies, nothing was catalogued, there were no obvious controls.  The counter seemed more of a mass grave than an experiment.  As I turned my binder over to record the death of the microorganism I saw two bloody fingerprints streaked across the back and realized that during that confused night with blood on my hands I must have touched this too and left those brown lines on it.  I didn’t want to look up at the walls of dead things at that moment.  I knew that there were drawers full of skulls and dissection tools as well and I thought I could feel all of them pressing in against me.  As I left the building I walked past the hallway display of skeletons and for the first time did not stop to look into the top corner where there is a frail human fetus (about 4 ½ months the placard says).

Be sure to look at our most popular story “Concern mounts over rising troop suicides”.  Five soldiers try to kill themselves everyday it says, up from less than one per day before the war began.  Don’t miss “Study: PTSD, not brain injury, may cause vets’ symptoms”.  Buy this anti-aging cream it says as well.  It’s “Smarter Than Botox” the ad reads as the artificially aged face of a woman is slowly transformed into an equally artificial young one.  Botox is botulinum toxin, the pathogen that causes botulism.  It makes you look younger because it paralyzes your muscles.  That’s why there is the stereotypical Botox side-effect of not being able to express emotion; you’ve injected your face with poison so that it can’t move. 

I’ve learned to stop clicking on those links because there is too much behind them, five “Don’t Miss” stories for every one that I read.  The first story you choose to look at, the first sorrow you search out, continues to influence you beyond the preliminary experience you sought to have with it.  Then you can’t ignore the way the stories build on each anymore.  You begin to see relationships lurking not only in the “Don’t Miss” section but in all of the things that span the width of the page and how every turn of phrase, every ad placed, suggests something larger and grimmer than simply the factual horrors the stories depict.  “Smarter Than Botox” it says and don’t miss “Oil fueling ethnic violence in Chad”, don’t miss “Walking the path of death in Bangladesh” where children play in the storm-water a few feet away from bloated bodies decomposing and unrecognizable.  “…a nightmare scenario for aid organizations…” the article says (emphasis added).

After a sudden peak in the population of experimental group four of my microorganisms there was a rapid decline.  Two days later, just after the population had doubled, every single one of them was dead.  Their containers smelled and were full of decomposing, left-over food.  There was a cricket loose in the room chirping somewhere behind me.  It had escaped from a lab during the previous week and so had avoided its fate as food for the chameleons living on campus.  There was a drop of clear liquid that had been on the workbench when I arrived.  I assumed the worst, that the bench was coated with dangerous chemicals, and I went about my work with an uncomfortable stiffness in my arms and hands, afraid to touch.  I dropped my binder on the desk and rubbed waterless sanitizer over my hands up to the wrist.  I put the organisms back into their storage area and moved to wash my hands in the sink in the back of the room; I felt oily and infected, I couldn’t shake the smell of the rotting bodies and food.  There was a pinkish-orange lobster floating in a jar at the sink’s edge that looked surprisingly soft and porous.  To my right there was an alligator skin sitting on top of a cabinet, its claws dangling over the edge.  Behind me, on the teacher’s table near the chalkboard, was a display of skulls; a tiny bird’s that felt as delicate as china, a cow’s with thick horns, a pig’s with short, sharp tusks, and next to the pig’s a human’s with broken teeth and a spring attached to its jaw allowing for a simulation of its function.  When I walked in I had held it and tried to see a person in its dark and empty eye sockets, tried to make a face grow to cover the white peaks and valleys of bone.  I hadn’t been able to.  Instead I had pulled its jaws open, stretched the squeaking spring until taut, wondered at the fear that I saw in the skull’s face when its mouth was agape, and then I let go of my hold on its pointy chin and watched the broken teeth snap together. 

Standing at the sink I felt burning in my eyes and realized I was about to cry.  I don’t know why I did.  I wanted to use a paper towel as a tissue but the dispenser was next to a container of acid and I was too afraid to touch it.    I wrote the changes in population in my binder.  I looked over an essay I had been handed back in English a few days before.  On the back of the essay I wrote, “I think that this is what I want to do.”  On my data sheets from the lab I wrote, “The cricket, I wonder if it will die here.”    

I woke up the other morning after a fitful night of sleep.  I hadn’t slept well for a week or two and I still don’t, I wake up at 3 a.m. and my dreams are too vivid.  I was becoming superstitious.  I heard somewhere once that 3 a.m. is the demonic witching hour and when I woke during that night I couldn’t move for the fear that something evil would notice me.  Standing in front of the mirror I saw a dark bead on my lower lip.  The skin of the lip had cracked during the night and the blood had pooled black and hard there with a plastic shine.  The inside was still sticky though, not hard and smooth like the out.  It was more like tree sap than plastic when I pulled it off.  It was dried or congealed but either way it was old, it had been there for a while.  In the reading I went to that day a girl read a poem about a homeless leper and maggots eating her flesh and the clear liquid that was oozing from the wound, and I thought back to my hand that I had injured previous and how at first the blood hadn’t come, only clear fluid had leaked from the hole.  The way I had checked and checked the hand, searched for the blood, until it came running out, and how since that first drop beaded up shiny and red in my palm I haven’t been able to stop it from flowing. 

As I walked to check my microorganisms the next day I was still tired.  I felt as though there was an unanticipated rollover effect going on.  Every day I was getting more tired, more confused, until I felt at noon the same way I had felt when I woke to find myself bloody and surprised in the dark.  Even worse I now had a sense of foreboding regarding the presence of blood in my life.  I found myself looking for the next sign, the next occurrence and even more than looking for expecting it, I was sure that it would come.  As I walked past the gym watching birds it occurred to me that if one were to land directly in my path and explode, its innards splattering against my face, I would not have been surprised.  It occurred to me simultaneously that during breakfast I had watched the face of the girl next to me, anticipating that at any moment blood would begin to drip out of her pores into the milk left behind in her bowl of Capt’n Crunch.  For a split second in my mind’s eye I saw a red drop hit the milky white and rebound back up before entering the milk again and diffusing to a pale pink before being absorbed into the white entirely. 

When the biology lab ended after thirteen days I compiled my data.  I wrote that I had overfed the microorganisms and that it had caused their population to grow to a point where they hit another factor that would limit growth but their numbers had grown so fast that instead of growth leveling off it caused massive deaths instead.  I wrote that if the limiting factor was oxygen availability then the death of one organism contributed to the death of another because the rotting of its body required oxygen.  That would be why all of the organisms died; the death of one didn’t solve the problem, it contributed to it.  It was a feedback cycle, a continuing loop where one event caused the other which caused the other and so on.  I wondered why I hadn’t been able to predict that result when planning the experiment.  Why I hadn’t realized that the amount of food I gave them could kill them.  I still wonder that.  I know that it’s with me because sometimes, when startled out a reverie, I find myself repeating a phrase in my head nonstop.  Before it’s been “I walked out in the rain-and back in the rain” or “something in time was fading”.  But it’s changed as of late.  I caught myself muttering again and again in a continual loop as I walked away from lab the other day, “all of the microorganisms suffocated.”