The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  “What am I doing here?” she asked herself softly, not for the first time wondering what she was doing in the hospital at four in the morning, what she was doing training for a profession to which she felt no true calling, doing work she knew she could tolerate but never love. She pressed her head further into the glass, conscious of but not caring about the security camera recording her episode of self-pity. She was imagining again the other professions she might have pursued—airline pilot, horticulturist, tomb raider—when a terrible noise, a nasty, wet slap, startled her. She leaped away from the glass and saw the bird: the tremendous wind had blown a gull against the bridge. Its beady eye caught and held hers, and it opened and closed its mouth four times, thrusting out its red tongue in a gesture both exhausted-looking and suggestive, before the wind lifted it and sent it sliding over the arch of the glass to spin away into the darkness.

  Jemma had lived in the city three years and never seen a storm like this. Rob had lived there all his life and judged this one pretty tame so far. They’d walked that morning from her apartment to the hospital complex, Jemma soaking her scrub pants to the knees when she waded through puddles in her rubber clogs. The hospital was just a big white lump in the rain, its lofty spirals and curling edges obscured, so it looked to Jemma like it was melting, and she wondered if they would even have found their way there if not for the giant round lights on the roof.

  She turned away from the glass and kicked the big silver button to open the doors, then passed into the children’s hospital. As many times as she’d passed from the hospital behind her into the hospital before her, she was still struck by the change. The beige walls of the adult hospital were replaced by a motley of primary color, linoleum the color of bile turned to firm carpet printed with hopscotch numbers, and the path to the NICU was laid out in the tiniest footprints. Jemma followed them, thinking as she walked how they might have been left by some impossibly toddling preemie—they were as red as the bloody red feet of a twenty-four-weeker, one of those unfinished things whose skin slipped off between your fingers if you pinched too hard. She walked past the giant pictures on the walls, six-foot by four-foot photos of healthy children at play. She thought it strange to hang pictures like these in a place where sick children lived, as if to scream at them: Look what you’re missing. Closer to the unit the pictures gave way to magnified newspaper articles detailing the triumphant progress made by the hospital in saving smaller and smaller babies. One sentence, picked out in bold beneath a photo of Dr. Bump, one of the supreme neonatologists, always caught her eye: One day we’ll be able to save the ones so small you can’t even see them. Jemma raised a hand to flick him in his nose as she passed—he was famously cruel to students and had just that week made her friend Vivian cry secret, locked-in-the-bathroom tears. Jemma pressed her ID badge to a sensor by the double doors of the unit and they opened with a hiss. The hall inside was quiet, but she could see through another set of doors into the first bay, where a cluster of doctors, nurses, and technicians were gathered around a bed she knew must be the new baby’s. She strode past the nurses lounging and gossiping in the hall, making her face a mask of purpose to discourage them from challenging her, like they usually did, with “Are you lost, sweetie?” Inside the bay, she was shooed into a corner. She watched the muttering cluster of bodies around the bed until it disgorged Rob, who clutched an endotracheal tube forlornly as he sidled up next to her, touching her arm with his arm.

  “I was supposed to get to do the UA catheter, but then Natalie did it. Like she needed to do another one—she’s only done a million of them. I was supposed to get to intubate after she pulled out her tube, but then they wouldn’t let me intubate a baby with a cleft palate. Chandra did it, or he tried. When he screwed it up, Emma took over. I didn’t do anything. Why am I even here?” He shook his head. “Did you know that she’s the daughter of a king?” Jemma nodded. It was common knowledge: this baby’s father was some sort of latter-day satrap, a king of the East who had fetched himself a blond, horse-toothed bride from a women’s college in New Jersey. The hospital attracted these stories. The giant-headed, cancerous, rotting offspring of the wealthy and fabulous mingled with the children whose living and lineage were common but whose diseases were so exclusive they were, if not entirely unique, limited to a select handful of sufferers. They came from all over the country and the world to put themselves at the mercy of bright minds.

  “Come with me,” Jemma said. “I need you.” He watched her finger as she raised it very slowly to place it on top of her head. It was not a seductive or even graceful maneuver, but he started at it, his eyes widened, and he looked back and forth from Jemma to the baby to Jemma again. “Come on,” she said.

  He lifted the ET tube toward her and shook it once, looked back again at the baby and smiled. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You said it yourself,” she said. “Why are you here?” She turned her leg out, wondering as she did it why she was presenting him with her beefy hip. It was not her best feature, and if he had ever praised it, it was only when he was drunk or utterly overcome with lust.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t.”

  “Maybe not,” she said, but she put her finger on her head again, and stood there a moment with her hip thrust out and her foot extended—it was the pose of a retarded ballerina, but it was all it took to get him to follow her out.

  They know where we are going, and they know what we are going to do, Jemma thought as they passed by the nurses’ station. It always seemed to her that people must know, and yet she was sure that nobody did. There were stories told of promiscuous decades long past, where people fucked madly in call rooms, operating rooms, or under the beds of the comatose, but she had never heard of it happening this year, or in this new hospital, not yet even a year old. The first time had been just two weeks before, at the beginning of the rotations that had landed them in the children’s hospital with the same call schedule. He had comforted her with it when Jemma came seeking him after her first delivery, a harrowing festival of abuse where it seemed that everyone had yelled at her for her incompetence: the obstetric and pediatric residents when she fumbled and nearly dropped the slimy baby; the baby’s mother, understandably cranky but too shrill, really, for any occasion save her own stabbing death; and even the baby himself, who parted his blue lips to caw at her, and who shat tarry meconium down her shirt. She cleaned up in Rob’s call room and he met her with a towel when she came out of the shower, rubbing her beyond dry. They considered, before formally beginning it, that they should not, and before continuing and finishing had a brief conversation in which they decided that they should not continue, let alone finish. That night, and again on their second and third call nights, Jemma had said, “We had better not ever do this again,” and he had said, “Not here, anyway.”

  But it always seemed like such a good idea when they did it, and it never took much more than their prearranged signal—the single finger placed on top of the head—to get him to agree. And it hardly seemed so bad, even after they finished and lay panting against each other, face to face, both staring guiltily at their pagers as if inviting from them a shrill, musical reprimand. There were worse things one could be doing. There were a multitude of drugs available for the consumption of the enterprising medical student—Rob was a competent enough hacker and Jemma a thief with long childhood experience, and not even the monolithic pyxis system that guarded every medication would have been able to withstand them if they had chosen to shoot up some propofol or snort morphine or place a row of fentanyl patches along their spines. They could be exceeding their authority in all sorts of ways—more a temptation for Rob than for Jemma—by attempting complicated procedures without supervision. There were babies they could have been dropping and children whose unshielded eyes might cry to a more sinister couple to be plucked out and parents vulnerable to lies and rumors of cure or of death. There was mischief worse than kissing Rob and lifting off his shirt. She was reluctant to give up his lips but eager
to bare his belly and his chest, and because she would not pull her mouth away from his he left the shirt hanging, a collar around his neck. It was nothing to hand each other the gift of a screwing, and more than nothing. It was a great thing, and the greatest thing—not the end of the world but a way to put the world utterly at bay and escape momentarily and intermittently from her awful past, her anxious present, and her dispiriting future, a way to escape from the hospital, a way to not be here—to undo the pink cord that held up his scrubs, pull down his pants, sing out the long O, and fall on him with her mouth.

  Their courtship was complicated. Long before he transferred into her class in their second year of medical school she had become convinced that everyone she loved was required by fate or God to die, and what could be more logical than that the wages of death should be loneliness? First her brother had died. When he was seventeen and she was fourteen he killed himself in a ritual of superhuman agony, leaving behind his burnt, partially dismembered body and a book that Jemma could hardly stand to read, though she understood that it was written more for her than for anyone else. She threw it in the Severn River a month after Calvin died.

  Her father died next, eaten up swiftly by lung cancer. His first symptom—a fine tremor in his surgeon’s hand—came in the summer when Jemma was seventeen. By January he was bedridden. By April he was delirious, mets in his brain having displaced the tissues that formerly had made a home for his reason. By July he could not speak, but only cried out when something frightened him, and spent whole afternoons in his living-room bed, reaching for invisible things in the air around his head.

  “Free at last!” her mother said, after her father was dead. He had never had any time for her, and they had married for all the wrong reasons, or for no reason at all, and she was twenty-one years tired of his selfishness and his mean drunks and his mighty fists, though really it was his blood more than hers that Jemma always found herself encountering in the aftermath of one of their great fights. It would leap out at her against the bright green linoleum of the kitchen floor, or else she would tread in it walking down the dark hallway outside their bedroom, or it would be there in the morning, a pattern on the wall above the breakfast table, spread by a blow to the head with the great bedpost-sized pepper shaker that her mother could wield with the speed and skill of a ninja assassin. There was always a shape to find in the blood, spread into swirls and smears in a clumsy, drunken clean-up, birds and bones and the delicate reaching leaves of a fern. But even so her mother had taken the tenderest care of him in his illness. Calvin would have said that she loved him best when he was utterly at her mercy.

  Free at last, her mother planned a trip around the world, and Jemma was not invited. “I’ll come back with your new daddy,” she said, calling Jemma at school on the eve of her departure. “Mr. Belvedere will be his name-o.” It was only six o’clock but she was ten p.m. drunk.

  “Have a good time,” Jemma said. “Send lots of postcards.”

  “I may not have time for postcards. I’m going to be awfully busy living for myself for the first time in my fucking life.”

  “I’m glad for you,” was all Jemma said. But though her mother really had bought a round-the-world airplane ticket, and though she had planned the trip in painstaking detail with a dog-faced travel agent named Sue, and though she had packed six months’ worth of safari clothes and sensible shoes, she never went on the trip. Instead, not long after hanging up with Jemma, she set fire to their house and burned herself up with it. I didn’t see her do it, but I can imagine it as well as Jemma could: her mother settled calmly in the kitchen chair where she was accustomed to do her drinking, smoking with her eyes closed while the walls burned. She left no note.

  Three deaths should have been enough to demonstrate Jemma’s danger, but they only made her suspect the horrible truth. It was easy to say instead that insanity and bad genes and tobacco were to blame. Three deaths hurried her more resolutely into the arms of her lover, a boy named Martin Marty who she’d been dating since they were in tenth grade. “We are already a family now,” he said to her one night not long after her mother’s funeral, because ever since Calvin he was always saying things meant to comfort her which only ended up horrifying her. He drove home drunk from a New Year’s party when they were juniors in college and was killed in a collision with a tree. Even then, she didn’t understand, and when the knowledge came, it was in slow bits, accretions that rose a little higher every day in her mind until they spelled out the shape and the letter of her doom. One day she woke up crying and knew it for sure: everyone she had loved was dead, and everyone she loved would die.

  So she promised herself she wouldn’t speak to Rob Dickens—she could see her crush as a black affliction hovering over him, and knew it was only wanted for her to speak to him before it would settle. She had so many graves available for swearing on, but that would be no use; she already knew herself for an oath-breaker, tried and untrue. She watched him during lectures, and watched him run by her apartment every morning, knowing she should avert her eyes, and yet she stared at him brazenly, dreadful window whore, and engaged him in weeks of abbreviated morning conversation. She swore she would not go out with him, if he should ask, but when he did ask she said yes without hesitation. And she took a solemn vow not to kiss him, but compelled by necessity, she did that, too. Outside her house, after dinner, she stood above him on a step and bent her head down to put her mouth on his. It was not a chaste kiss. It was very familiar, so intimate it was almost gruesome. She thought about his dinner the whole time she kissed him, the way he had eaten it, the way his thick wrist poked out of his shirt cuff when he cut his meat. She had not tasted veal since she was in fifth grade, when Emma Rose McBurney detailed the sad fate of a veal calf for her, and showed her a movie after school. Jemma had wept at the enormous cruelty of veal, and sworn never to eat it again. But she tasted it in his mouth that night, and on his breath when he blew it into her lungs. She pulled away, gasped a little, and coughed.

  “Goodnight!” she said, and ran away upstairs and into her apartment, where a roach was waiting for her, perched on the counter in the little kitchen set in a corner of her living room. It was a great big bug, black as the blackest beetle, and as she stood in the door watching it watch her, her imagination invested it with a parental mixture of fury and concern. Its wriggling antennae were signing to her. Where have you been? it demanded. What were you doing? She hated roaches, but she was afraid to kill it because she suspected it might contain the soul of her first lover—somehow it seemed most likely to be him, and not her brother or her father or her mother. Spiders, frogs, little reptiles—all creatures that horrified her—any of them might contain that soul wandered back to be near her, and so she was gentle toward them. The roach skibbled down a cabinet and ran at her. When she fled it pursued her down the hall, running not just on the floor but on the walls and the ceiling in a big loose spiral. She got to her bedroom, slammed the door and stared anxiously at the space underneath it. It was big enough to admit two roaches, one piggybacking on top of the other, but the roach didn’t come in. He never came into her bedroom—they seemed to have an agreement about that. Still, she imagined him scolding her from the other side of the door, just like a parent might. What were you thinking? he asked. Are you trying to kill him?

  From her window she peeped down at the sidewalk. Rob wasn’t there, but she thought she could see his wide, handsome back retreating over the bridge across the street. It spanned a little horseshoe-shaped canal, which many decades before had been a swimming hole, but now was too toxic for bathing. He lived only a few blocks away. If he ran home along the top of the thin railing that kept children from falling into the poisoned waters, it would not be a surprise, because it was his habit to leap up on things, and to test his balance against ledges and curbs and sills. And if he fell into the water and drowned, it would not be a surprise, because she had imperiled him with her kiss.

  She lay down on her narrow bed, the same one
upon which she’d been sleeping since she was five years old, on the old mattress that still bore the deep impression of the much fatter body she used to inhabit, and she dreamed of veal. In her sleep she followed the weeping of a calf through gray half-darkness, until she found its miserable stall. It cried with the voice of a human child. She knelt to quiet it, saying, There, there, little one, it will be all right. But she knew it would die to please the appetites of man. She cried, ashamed of how she had lied to it, and it began to comfort her. Its little hoof stroked her head, and its soft lips kissed her cheek and her mouth. In a little while longer they were making out, she and the veal calf. Its thick, nimble tongue darted over her own and made her mouth an organ of intense pleasure.

  She woke up feeling dizzy and hungover, though she’d had only a single glass of wine the night before. Her mouth tasted like veal, and her room smelled of it. She felt sure that she must have been panting through her mouth the whole night long, polluting her room with the odor of cruel meat. She went to the window to get a breath of untainted air. It was almost seven o’clock, time for him to come running by. He would be wet from the running, and she would think, as she always did, about how it had always seemed to her that people looked better when they were wet, and she would remember ducking repeatedly into the bathroom in high school, where she would wet down her hair in the hope of improving her looks. She’d felt beautiful just once in her life, caught in a rainstorm with her first lover. In the middle of a busy sidewalk he’d kissed her and, with his hand cradling her head, had squeezed out a flood of water from her hair. When it fell down her neck, under her collar, she felt it even over the pouring rain.