99.9

Forward

I am sick of those stories about the sociologically elite.

Those .1% chosen ones finding their beautiful chosen destinies: touching love stories about how the rich, beautiful and brilliant find someone equally rich, beautiful and brilliant, thereby saving themselves from the fate of a life with someone incapable of appreciating the rarity of their gifts.

I am not one of those people

Neither are you.

You are part of 99.9% of the human race, condemned to live their lives in sheep-like uncertainty.

Don't read this if you fit into the former group: You don't need that kind of help.

Don't read this if you want to imagine yourself in the role of someone more worthy: I don't have that kind of imagination. Go read Ayn Rand. She understands your needs.

This is a story about me. ME. And if I am a little uppity about it right now, then you'll have to excuse me. Voices begin tentatively when eeking out their first baaaahh for the sheep of mankind, and gross overcompensation is the only way,at times, to take up the slack

Chapter 1

I've never been told I am beautiful. Well, not by anyone who didn't perceive it as the quickest path to physical or monetary gratification. Both of which I am capable of giving and give freely. That is, I am easy. Or easy going. It all depends how you look at it, and I am not given to such distinctions. To be more specific, I am better at saying yes than no, which explains how I ended up in the backwoods of a posh ski resort with inferior equipment, while my adorable skiing companion was already half way down the mountain, after flirting her way into a demo line of the newest snowboarding equipment, and after convincing me that my new boots were wasted on the inferior equipment I personally had been issued..

And while I may not be part of the elite, I am not used to such shoddy equipment. That is my excuse, at any rate, of how I ended up with a broken arm in the middle of nowhere, as the sun set low on an unfortunately cold winter day.

Ended up with a COMPOUND fracture, no less, bleeding into the snow at an alarming rate, watching it form concentric patterns around me like a bullseye as I lay there, trying to ascertain if I had enough energy and balance to make it all the way down, which I most certainly did not.

But the bull's eye gave me an idea. And, delirious with pain, excited by my own ingenuity, that was how he found me: giggling as I was performing the very gross task of using my own blood to make out an "SOS" in the snow.

Yes, that was what I was doing as he jumped the hill above me and almost landed on my arm. My good arm.

He cursed, and I smiled in response, but, I'm sure my smile came off as ghoulish instead of calming. When he pulled his goggles off he already looked as if he was going to cry.

"How fast can you make it down the hill?"

He looked around, as if I were addressing someone else.

"How FAST can you make it down the hill to get help?"

"pretty fast?"

He was lying, I had seen that jump and HIS inferior equipment. The only way he was getting down that hill was on his ass.

I had an idea.

"look at me, listen, I KNOW you are lost…are you lost? … I thought so…I need help in a very desperate way…I need you to go straight down that hill to the lodge" he looked down the very steep hill infront of him, the one he was clearly planning to circumvent until he found another green run (or maybe a blue run, if he was really stuck)…"it's a double black run…what are you DOING up here..never mind, I know.. I want you to take it on your ASS all the way DOWN as fast as possible, and I want you to get ski patrol …please…good, and this is important, tell them I need BLOOD, and…give them this name… and if you could…I would really REALLY appreciate something alcoholic or STRONGER"

He took a joint out of his pocket and a lighter and tossed it my way.

No surprise, there.

"Thank you… I'll hide it when I see them coming…please go…"

He jumped in the air, landing gracefully on his ass, sliding straight down the hill with atleast 150 lbs of inertia. And then, I suppose, I passed out from the pain.

He later told me he would never wear red, again. When he had made that jump he had noticed something rather…unusual: that the blood spreading through the snow was the most breathtaking shade of crimson he had ever seen. That was the artist in Josh. Josh was an artist. A SENSITVE artist. Prone to over-reacting, really, to even the smallest thing.

But I digress. And I foreshadow. Naughty me.

My point was that Josh saw all the blood, and had two simultaneous thoughts:

"Holy Shit! This girl is dying! "and "That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen…look at the contrast…look at the white…so very white against the red, so very red against the white…."

Well, you get it.

It made him feel guilty enough to visit me at the hospital, to make sure that enough of that beauty had stayed inside of me.

And he never really could wear red again.

So there was Josh, in all neutral colors, when I floated out of my anesthetic stupor.

Josh was at a distinct loss for words when I awoke.

You couldn’t really blame him, I mean, he didn’t even know my name and I could barely remember who he was. The look of sheer panic on his face rivaled the last time I had seen him, and such discomfort pulled me out of my chemical stupor with a peppiness that took both of us surprise.

“Hey! How’s it going?’

Josh responded with a stutter that was probably charming.

It only took him a few moments to get out his name, but by then I had passed out again.

When I awoke the second time I actually recognized all the faces around me.

“So, who is that guy who took you here?” “What happened anyway?” “Don’t you think it’s kind of odd that he hasn’t left yet?”

It was all too much…“he’s still here? …wow, that’s really considerate…”

I was in amazing pain. Oh wow.

“I think he’s just a little wigged out by the whole thing, I mean, there was a lot blood…”

“ He’s been here 2 days”

Okay, that was weird. It had been 2 days?

“2 days? What did they do, install a new arm?”

Everyone looked a little nervous.

“Well, you lost a lot of blood. They had to do a transfusion, and the doctors were a little concerned about you…you passed out from the blood loss, and their was a bit of shock, and I guess your friend over there really came through for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well…he gave you blood…I guess you both have a rare blood type, and you really lucked out that he stuck around long enough for them to figure it out.”

And for the third time in my life…

and the third time in three days.. I passed out.

Let me tell you something about blood. It inhabits the human subconscious like it inhabits our veins. Religion, biology, superstition, they all have something to say about blood. From vampires to medical bleeding, Aliens to AIDS. All of our precious bodily fluids.

I’m sort of a superstitious person. But I’m also sort of a physiology geek. Most people, it seems, prefer to think of themselves as packages of mysterious goo. Hard in some places, soft in others, but goo, nonetheless. I fall on the other end. I’m one of those people who thinks they can feel each organ functioning independently, and I get significantly spooked when alerted to the opposite. I remember, while observing an autopsy, realizing exactly how big the pancreas was. I was horrified to realize I had always felt it to be higher, and bigger, and just not where it very clearly was. That freaked me out for a week solid.

And, of course, I couldn’t feel Josh’s blood coursing through me any more than I could feel the residual acids of a palm I had just shaken.

Except that, of course, I could. I could feel my donor when I flexed my arm, and when I stretched my shoulders, and when they took my blood pressure I could feel him rising with me.

Every unreasonable part of me told me that I now had a blood-brother, and that I really owed him a bit of gratitude

They wouldn’t give me his information at the hospital, no matter how much I begged, but apparently he had no problem getting mine, what with my wallet securely tucked in his jacket pocket, and left there in all the confusion.

A week after I arrived home I received a package with my wallet in it, a brief note explaining how he had ended up with it (checking for my ID with the rescue team, it seems) and how he had just realized that he still had it, along with wishes for a speedy recovery, and, conveniently enough, a return address on the envelope. As it turned out, Josh lived just on the other side of the bay.