Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [2]
And yet the mere mention of blood can induce a cringe. Reading about it makes some people squeamish. You can even taste blood without having it on your tongue. It’s a taste of, well, wrongness, I suppose—an emotional “taste” that things aren’t as they should be. At such moments one turns into a kind of temporary synesthete, a person whose senses are commingled. Synesthetes taste sights, see tastes, feel colors, hear shapes. An E-flat triggers a visual field of triangles, say, or pain manifests as a blue aura. For the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, as idiosyncratic in his synesthesia as in his writing, every letter of the alphabet radiated a precise color; for example, O was the hue of an “ivory-backed hand-mirror.” His wife, Vera, who also had synesthesia, would likely have disagreed, for two synesthetes’ perceptions are almost never the same. An ivory O to one is black shoe polish to another.
This condition is rare—as few as ten people in a million have synesthesia, according to a recent American study, a figure that makes the pairing up of Vladimir and Vera even more extraordinary. Yet many of us, I believe, experience a similar phenomenon upon seeing blood. Blood is warmth to some; an overheated room. To others, blood is noise; a rabbit’s racing heartbeat. But I don’t see it that way. To me, blood is silence. It is slow motion, the pause between seconds. It is a sharpness, dry air, clarity.
Blood also marks the divide between me and my partner of fourteen years, Steve. He has HIV, a fact I’ve known since our first date. Steve’s always been extremely cautious about blood—overly so, I’ve thought at times. If he nicked himself shaving, for instance, he wouldn’t allow me within kissing range of his face. At those moments, I tended to act blithely unconcerned. Against his wishes, I might plant a kiss on his forehead—“See, no harm done.” I’ve never wanted Steve to think I was afraid of him.
I’ve seen him with a bloody nose before, but not with a serious, bleeding wound until a short time ago. While he was stocking food on the bottom shelf in our pantry, the iron toppled from the top shelf, a fall of about three feet, hitting Steve, tip-first, on the head. I heard his oophf! of pain and surprise and watched him stumble out of the pantry, trailing blood like beads of a broken necklace. My first impulse, Help him, was instantly followed by a second, seemingly contradictory one: Protect yourself. With blood dribbling down Steve’s face, mine went pale, I could tell, and I froze.
I stood there at least long enough for our eyes to meet. I looked stunned, no doubt, if not plain guilty; I’d been the last to use the iron and had left it too close to the edge. But concern for Steve broke through my self-absorption. I pivoted and grabbed paper towels as he said, calmly yet forcefully, “Put . . . on . . . gloves.” His extended hand established an invisible force field between us, a danger zone I could not enter. Though I didn’t have any obvious open cuts through which I could get infected, I knew it was better to be prudent. I dropped the towels and scrambled to the bathroom closet, returning with a pair of disposable latex gloves, gauze, and disinfectant.
Steve sank to the kitchen floor and sat there, eyes closed, gingerly assessing the damage with his fingertips, a slow spider’s crawl to feel if his skull was cracked. His hand came away sopped, but, he told me, there was no fracture, just a gash. Gloved, I blotted it with gauze and examined the scalp beneath his sticky flattop; the cut didn’t look deep enough to require stitches. It stopped actively bleeding in minutes, in fact. Steve was even able to joke that his Mega Hold hair gel must have blunted the impact.
Though this isn’t a pleasant admission, after Steve was cleaned up, I realized I’d found it thrilling to see his blood in such quantity—on his brow, staining paper towels, in a spattering on the floor. Its luminous