Unneeded

While I was serving my fourth month, I got marched to the infirmary for a check-up and blood samples, too close to the last one. I didn’t think much of it – that’s not true. Like with everything else that broke the pattern during my sentence, I tried to find foreshadowing in it, some hope of reduced time, or some threat. I couldn’t think of a reason, so the thoughts stopped there.

The next evening, I sat in the common room with a car magazine, in an attempt to keep my brain sharp. The common room had the same configuration as the waiting-room of a medical centre. If you didn’t see a guard, or look down at our faded pink uniforms, the colour of vintage bureaucratic forms, it was easy to twist your brain into some mode where you could believe that you were able to walk out the corridor, across the lobby and into the street.

A guard stepped through the glazed door on the corridor, another waiting outside.

“Ms. Nygren?” she said, and I got up from the couch.

They brought me to the head office, and there I was given the offer. I could have said no, but the difference was over seven years’ imprisonment. It wasn’t a choice.

His name was Saint-Michael. He was a billionaire, but short on haematopoietic cells in his bone marrow; a side effect of chemotherapy for hereditary leukaemia. One of the prison physicians who had taken my bloods was there in the office, explaining it to me. I was the one they’d found who best matched his genetic profile. Regular donations would give him several decades.

The office was cramped with so many people. I had the notion that it was too warm, I was getting woozy. The man of the hour wasn’t there, but the Warden ratcheted his monitor towards me and let me see photos where he stepped out of a long glossy car, a bit badly cropped.

“It’s not like I’m going to marry him,” I joked.

But I no longer dared joke without adding “just kidding.” I reached for the pen, as quickly as I could without them taking it as an attempt at anything.

I don’t need to say that I preferred it to the prison, but I unironically liked being Saint-Michael’s donor. Now I lived in a penthouse apartment that was bigger than any place I’d lived before, one I could never have afforded. I could get food sent up that I would never have had a chance to try.

I could sit alone in my vast salon in shades of obsidian and ivory, eating something luxurious whose flavour I can’t remember, looking out at the smooth plane of the ocean as it went from blue to dull steel. I made sure to eat a lot of red meat and dark greens, but I don’t know whether it had any effects other than the psychosomatic. They sent up an envelope with nutritional supplements with one meal per day.

When Saint-Michael went anywhere, even if it was just a day-trip conference, he wanted me along. Then I walked surrounded by his bodyguard, wearing a dress uniform the dull liver-red of the blood-forming marrow. Entourage. I guess I was a bodyguard, too, and someone requiring protection.

He talked to me a couple of times. One of the times he asked me how old I was, and when I said “twenty-eight,” he said:

“That’s good, you’re going to last.”

He said it without laughing, as if it were a compliment.

Paparazzi wanted to know whether I slept with him, and for a while I didn’t know whether it was a lie to say “no.”

I lay in a white hospital bed in a white-draped room. My pelvic bone – where they had inserted a heavy-gauge needle and pumped the marrow out – ached, not so much that I wasn’t able to hide it for the nurses or visitors. I shifted between positions and couldn’t find one that made the pain subside. It was as if I could still feel metal breaching the bone, the thick thread of a screw.

My ward was padded with vases of white roses and carnations, as if I were a dying princess. Folded cards crowded my nightstand. The way they were trying to fuel my ego disturbed me. It disturbed me that I was so susceptible.

I picked up the nearest card. It had a print with a female knight in armour, and the words “My Heroine.”

Perhaps the attention was something more addictive than the foie gras and the liquid obsidian screens.

I wasn’t there when Saint-Michael stepped out of his car and collapsed as if two strings had snapped in his knee-joints. I think I was in the gym on the south end of my flat. I was trying to rebuild my body after the latest transplant and convalescence.

He didn’t die that time. They brought him to the emergency ward. I picture an ambulance zipping as quickly and silently as some science fiction vehicle that moves along beams of light. He came out a couple of days later, maybe a little washed out, with a joke prepared. It had been a myocardial infarction.

I don’t know if he felt that he couldn’t breathe. This wasn’t what he or his closest had prepared themselves for.

The physicians told me everything I wanted to know. They don’t have the right to keep anything from me.

His heart is weakened, but he has access to the best healthcare in the world. (That was how he got me.) If he has a second one, he might not survive it. I studied the statistics for recurrence, as if he’d been my dad.

I’m still employed, obviously; it’s not as if he’s going to stop needing me. It was only during a few days of his convalescence that I wandered the tower like a revenant and was surprised when anyone reacted to me. I didn’t know whether I ought to be afraid of being thrown out, or of something else.

I don’t know how long I have.

THE END