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sheet, getting a good look at the ceiling. Out in the large anteroom, a couple of hundred others looked at the television or studied the floor, waiting to be attached to plastic bags and drained of five dollars’ worth of blood plasma.
    Jamie didn’t like any of it. If she let her eyes go too loose, checking out the tiles above, she started crying.
    A man in a white coat was going down her row, jabbing everybody with a needle and getting their blood to shoot through a tube into a quart-sized plastic bag that sat on a scales beside each table. He came to Jamie, smiling like a leopard. She shut her eyes and thought about the beach. “First time?” the man said, and Jamie said nothing. “Give your fist a squeeze about once per second,” the man said.
    â€œOw! You nailing my arm to the bed, or what?”
    â€œRelax,” the man said, doing things with tubes and tape. Jamie thought of the beach, the water filled with surfers in wetsuits in the wintertime, all of them waiting for a great wave to lift and carry them toward the deserted Santa Cruz amusement park. In a minute she let one eye sneak open and watched the blood fill her plastic bag as once per second she relaxed her fist and then closed it tightly. The blood was bright red at first, but it grew darker, nearly black, as the bag fattened. The scales tipped when the bag held a pint. She heard others around her telling the nurses, “I’m full,” “I’m full,” and when another nurse, a woman, came near, Jamie said, “I’m full.”
    The nurse smelled of alcohol and talcum as she bent over Jamie’s bag of blood. She put the bag on a smaller scales that she carried with her and said, “Not quite full. Pump a little more.” Jamie didn’t see how one set of scales knew more than another. She opened and closed her fist several times. “All . . . right,” the nurse said, and Jamie quit. The nurse removed Jamie’s tourniquet and adjusted stoppers and tubes. “You’re going to feel the saline solution coming into your arm now,” the nurse said. “That’s just to keep the vein open.” She clamped and cut the tube that led into the blood, and carried the bag away to another room, where the plasma would be removed somehow.
    Jamie thought her blood looked like good earth, rich and full and wet. “Used to take goldfish home from the carnival in plastic bags like that,” she told the departing nurse, who didn’t hear. She began shivering all over as the cool saline mixed into her system.
    The man on her left said, “Fuck goldfish. Fuck ’em.” He was a bearded old guy and he was shaking like a machine.
    The man on her right said, “Did you know this? Frogs fuck goldfish. That’s true. No fooling, now.”
    â€œHey,” Jamie said. “I can’t use that talk. Be a gentleman, how about.”
    â€œHow about if I whip it out and piss on you?” the man said. “How’s that for a gentleman?”
    Jamie didn’t say anything. She decided to stab him with her nail file later on, on the way out.
    The bearded old man on her left said, “Don’t pay no attention to these guys.” He turned toward her onto his side, careful not to disturb the needle in his vein. “Most of them,” he said, “are just wooden people.” His face seemed to be rotting: away on him. His eyes were shiny as a blind man’s.
    Jamie said nothing, but the man wanted to talk “Most of the people you see are just wooden men,” he told her, his voice quaking as if he’d cry in a minute. “They’re dead people, walking around like the living.”
    â€œYeah,” Jamie said. “I noticed that myself.”
    â€œYou have?” The man was excited. “Then you’re one of the living.” He licked his mouth convulsively. “There’s not too many of us. We haven’t got much