THE BLOOD BANK operated out of a cramped storefront off the Bowery on East 3rd Street. Several men were scattered among the short, jagged rows of metal chairs that crisscrossed the front of the building. Some of them munched the plain sugar cookies distributed after the blood had been taken. Others were still waiting, their fingers holding idly to small cards with hand-lettered red numbers.
“Thirty-seven,” someone called from the back of the room.
Corman turned toward the voice and saw a tall man in a slightly soiled lab coat. He wore large, black-rimmed plastic glasses and cradled a clipboard in the crook of his left elbow.
“Thirty-seven,” he repeated. His eyes darted left and right, surveying the crowd. “Thirty-seven.”
A very thin old man eased himself to his feet, then walked shakily past Corman, nudging him slightly with his shoulder as he made his way down the aisle toward the tall beige curtain that divided the room. He had an oddly crumpled look, as if his body had been snatched up, crushed in a large hand then tossed back to earth.
“Your name Sanderson?” the man in the lab coat asked him.
The old man grunted, shifted on his feet, then reached listlessly for the clipboard.
The man in the lab coat drew it away from him. “Just a second, please,” he said sharply, then adjusted his glasses. “Have you been hospitalized recently, Mr. Sanderson?”
“No.”
“How old are you?”
Sanderson shrugged. “Somewhere ’round sixty, I guess.”
The man in the lab coat looked doubtful, but wrote it down on the form anyway. “Are you on any form of medication?”
Sanderson grinned. “Just my old standby,” he said.
The other man scribbled something on the form.
Sanderson waved his hand impatiently. “And it’s ‘no’ to all the rest of them questions.”
The man in the coat nodded, made a few checks on the paper, then escorted Sanderson behind the curtain.
Corman walked to the front row, shoved his camera bag beneath one of the chairs and sat down. For a moment, he stared about, trying to get a fix on the room by concentrating on the details: a Coca-Cola wall calendar, its pages a month behind, the soda machine next to it, a small table filled with uneven stacks of medical pamphlets, the poster of an earnest physician urging regular checkups on the listless men who muttered obliviously a few feet away. One by one, Corman envisioned the individual frames, trying to find a way to get beyond the obvious social ironies and cliches.
“Excuse me.”
Corman glanced around and faced the man in the lab coat.
“May I help you?” the man asked.
Corman reached into his pocket, brought out the small yellow receipt and handed it to him.
The man glanced at it peremptorily and gave it back. “What about it?”
Corman pocketed the receipt. “Do you recognize the name?”
“Yes.”
“She died last week,” Corman said.
“Was she a relative of yours?” the man asked.
“No,” Corman said. “I’m a photographer. I’m working on a story about her.”
The man thought for a moment, his eyes squeezing together slightly. “I do remember her,” he said finally. “Probably because she was white, a woman. We don’t get that down here.”
“Did you ever talk to her?”
The man nodded. “We try to be cordial to people,” he said. “We usually talk to them a little during the procedure. Like a hairdresser would, at about that level. We don’t give counseling or anything like that. That’s not our function.”
Corman took out his notebook. “Do you remember anything she said?”
The man shrugged. “Not really.”
“Do you remember when you saw her the last time?”
“Whenever that receipt was dated,” the man said. “Not since then.”
“How often did you see her?”
“No more than once a month,” the man said firmly. “We can’t accept blood more often than that. It’s against the law.”
Corman remembered the outstretched arm. “She had a lot of needle marks.”
“Maybe she was a junkie.”
Corman shook his head.
The man didn’t argue the point. “She could have been selling blood all over the place. We’re not the only one, and some of them don’t keep very good track of who’s been in and out.”
“Do you remember anything in particular about her?”
“She had a doll with her,” the man told him, as if suddenly recalling her with more detail. “She treated it like a real baby.”
“Was she alone?”
“Yes, always,” the man said.
“Did you notice if she talked to any of the other people?”
“As far as I can remember, she always sat alone.” He nodded toward the left corner of the room. “Over there, in that chair by the window. That’s where she sat until we called her number.”
Corman glanced at the chair. It was made of gray metal and one of the hinged supports was bent, throwing it off balance. “And you never saw her with anybody?”
“No.”
Corman felt the little notebook go slack in his hand, like a small bird that had just died. “Do you know anything at all about her?”
“Only what she wrote on the form.”
The bird’s eyes fluttered. “What form?”
“The one they have to fill out.”
“Do you still have it? Would you mind showing it to me?”
“No,” the man said. “Wait here.” He turned and disappeared behind the curtain.
Corman waited, his hand pumping rhythmically at the notebook as his eyes circled the room once again, looking for shots, noting a few more details, an old shoe lodged between two chairs, a plastic spoon on the windowsill, the fact that someone had started to paint the radiator blue, then abandoned the project halfway through. More cliche images. As pictures, they would fit perfectly in a light blue, tear-shaped frame. The chair the woman had always sat in would do the same. He took a few pictures of it anyway, hoping that after he’d developed them, Julian would not be able to see their grim melodrama.
“Here it is,” the man said as he came out from behind the curtain a few minutes later. “It’s just a simple form, not much on it.”
Corman took the paper from the man’s hand and stared at it intently. The woman had answered its few questions in a tiny, cramped handwriting that used up only a small amount of the space provided. The longer words were broken up into their syllables as Corman remembered being taught to do in elementary school. The spelling was crudely phonetic.
“Strange, I know,” the man said, “but she still fit the test for informed consent.”
Corman looked at him. “Which is?”
“That she was correctly oriented as to space and time.” The man answered matter-of-factly, as if he were reading it from a script.
“And that’s all she needed to know?” Corman asked.
“It was all
Corman glanced back down at the form. She’d signed her own name and listed the name and address of someone to contact in the event of an emergency: “Burneece Taylur Ate Nyn Grow-ve” He studied the writing for a moment, then glanced back up at the man. “Bernice Taylor? Eighty-nine Grove Street?”
The man gave a quick look at the form. “Probably,” he said.
