The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  She stood at the window, looking back and forth between her clock and the street. At exactly seven he came running over the bridge. He stopped at the bottom of her stoop, and shaded his eyes against the sun to look up at her. “Hi there!” he called up. She could feel her four dead standing behind her, and hear them calling down, Welcome to the family!

  Please, she said to them. She was supposed to close her shutters and go sit on her bed, and consider how she had done the right thing, but instead she just stood there, staring at him stupidly until he asked her for another date.

  “What kind of doctor do you want to be?” she asked him, surely a first-date question, but she didn’t ask it until that night, over dinner at a vegetarian restaurant.

  “The nice kind,” he said.

  “Are there other kinds?”

  “Medicine brings out the worst in a person.”

  “I don’t think so. Do you really think so?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But think about it. You see people at their absolute worst, and all your own personal failings—your weakness, your stupidity, your laziness—show up in their continuing decline. And even if you make them better, they just come back, sicker and needier.”

  He looked down at his plate, quietly scooping and dumping his fancy macaroni and cheese with a big spoon. “It’s a privilege to see people at their worst,” she told him, which was something her father liked to say. “You seem nice enough still.”

  “I’m already corrupted,” he said.

  “You still smell good, though,” she said without thinking about it, and blushed furiously. “I mean, if you were really corrupt you’d smell like bad meat or old yogurt or…” She put a carrot in her mouth so she would stop talking.

  “How about you?” he asked her.

  “Oh yes, very corrupt.”

  “I mean what do you want to end up doing?”

  “Surgery,” she said. “Surgery, surgery—my dad was a surgeon.”

  “A legacy of corruption,” he said, smiling. Now he had insulted her—reason enough to throw a carrot at him but not reason enough to kill him; still she just sat there, anxious and admiring. He had very large hands.

  She took the vow again: no kisses. And she further swore that when he tried to kiss her, she would hold up her hand and drop her chin. She had practiced the gesture in front of her mirror, shaped her smile until she thought it could only be interpreted as regretful and demure, and practiced the backward walk. “I can’t,” she’d said to her reflection. “I just can’t,” words chosen because they were truthful and because they seemed most likely to cause the least hurt. Hand still in the air, she’d walk backward toward her door, not speaking, not answering him if he spoke, then go upstairs to sit at her kitchen table and watch the roach shiver with delight when she told him how it was all over.

  The roach was waiting for them when she led Rob upstairs. Not five feet from the door, it seemed to be settling its weight impatiently back and forth from one set of legs to the other. “I’ll get it,” said Rob, and took a step forward to stomp the bug. Jemma threw her whole body into him and pushed him off balance. He stumbled across the room and fell, striking his head on the soft edge of the couch. The roach fled.

  “Sorry!” she said, speaking to him and the roach both. “Sorry!” He’d apologized just like that when she ducked away from his goodnight kiss. She had raised her hand in the practiced gesture of final forbidding, but rather than make the gesture she thought she wanted—stop, go away, we can’t do this—it had fastened on his hot ear and drawn his face to hers. Sprawled by the couch, he lay very still for a moment, and she worried that he was dead already. When she helped him up she kept her hand in his and drew him back to her bedroom.

  Was the thumping noise the bedpost knocking on her wall, or was it the roach throwing himself in fury against her door? She’d sealed up the crack with a towel so he couldn’t intrude if anger drove him to break their unspoken agreement, but she could hear him in the guttural utterances that issued from her new friend, deep, groaning syllables that rearranged themselves in her head into words—what are you doing, what are you doing, and then what have you done?

  “I can’t see you anymore,” she told him the next day. It was easier to say than she’d anticipated that it would be. The words came out of her mouth in a smooth, fluid rush.

  On the bridge across the canal, she was walking him home, he on the railing but holding on to her hand. When she was small she’d walked that way with her mother, her mother’s arm lending her balance, and the rail or bench elevating her so they were equally tall. But the rail made him much taller than Jemma, and he was too sure of his balance to need a loan from her.

  “Don’t say that,” he said. The sun was just behind him, so his head seemed replaced by a ball of flame. She closed her eyes against him and saw not just the blinking orange globe but his face, too, in disappointed afterimage.

  “I can’t see you anymore,” she said again, not opening her eyes but stepping back and pulling her hand free.

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” she said.

  “What did I do?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just a bad idea. No, just that… it’s just impossible, is all.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is.”

  “But it isn’t,” he said. She didn’t reply, and they stood facing each other in silence. She opened her eyes one at a time, just peeping at first, thinking he might be gone, but he still stood there looking down at her with his arms folded across his chest. People passed them, single or in pairs or accompanied by dogs, and some stared curiously.

  “Look,” he said finally, “it’s always impossible, isn’t it? This is impossible, but happens anyway. Watch.” He swung his arms behind him, then brought them forward over his head, and the rest of his body followed, first his belly, then his thighs, and then his feet flying up not a foot from her nose, making a breeze that she felt against her ears. He flipped full around once and landed solidly on the rail. It was perfectly done. He would not have fallen if Jemma hadn’t grabbed at him and knocked him off balance. She shrieked and put out both her hands to pull him in, but she only succeeded in pushing him into the pond. He looked distinctly surprised and even betrayed as he fell, but made no sound as he went into the water.

  Now I’ve done it, she thought calmly, but not resisting an urge to pull miserably at her face. A vision flashed in her head of his very white bones surfacing in the acid water and bobbing about a little before dissolving into pink, marrowy foam.

  “I made it!” he called up to her. “I had it landed before you pushed me!” She ran off down the bridge, meaning to run entirely out of his life. He could suffer a collision with her and not die for it. He would suffer this little damage and then go on living. Goodbye, goodbye! she called out in her head as she ran, imagining the other woman he would find. She would be prettier than Jemma but stupider, and she would be the type of woman compelled to uncover the past lovers of her lovers. When she heard the story of Jemma’s behavior she would be utterly unable to fathom it.

  “I’m only calling,” she told him four days later, “to tell you I can never see you again. And to tell you to stop calling me every day.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “It makes me embarrassed for you,” she said. “All the messages.”

  “Yes. Will you see me tonight?”

  “Of course,” she said, meaning to say, of course she would like to, but she certainly could not. But he had hung up and was already on his way to the bridge. When he stood under her window and called for her she went down to him, a voice in her head as she went down the stairs—her mother’s or her brother’s or her father’s or her lover’s—remarking how her resolve was as sturdy as a peeled banana.

  But I like him, she said to herself, to them, slowing on the curving steps.

  It doesn’t matter.

  And he likes me, I think.

  It doesn’t matter.

>   And I need him.

  Who’s to say what’s necessary? What’s your need compared to his life?

  You’re just being superstitious.

  Is it superstition to insist that the sun rises in the East?

  Shut up! she said, not out loud—she wasn’t that crazy. Though she could call them out of the dark to stand silently around her bed, and though they were the constant companions of her dreams, and though she still consulted her mother on which days were skirt days and which days were pants days, and exalted with her brother in a great high or a stupendous drunk, and though she continued to have imaginary, masturbatory sex with her departed lover, she knew they weren’t real when they stood before her on the last four steps, raising their hands in the gesture she had practiced: stop, no more, go back upstairs. Four is enough, her father said. She passed right through them.

  She thought that she might catch the roach and set it free outside, but it hid from her whenever she sought it. A few times, studying on her couch, she felt watched, and looked up to see it on the counter, waving its antennae as if in admonition or warning. When she chased it, it evaded her easily. Her best opportunity to banish it was whenever Rob Dickens came for her. The roach was always waiting near the door, but if she caught it she’d have to spirit it past him, or else hold it in her purse until there was a time in their evening when she could set free. The dinnertime disaster had already played a few times in her head: her purse carelessly closed; a tickle on her leg, belly, breast and neck; the roach emerging from around her ear to perch on her head and regard the endangered rival; the screams of the waitress.

  He was a candle lover. They gave his bedroom the air of a chamber of sacrifice; they were all around his bed, in free-standing iron sconces, on the nightstands and dresser, in an enormous chandelier brought back from a year in Belgium. When they were all lit, the room was almost as bright as a hospital hallway. It was the bedroom of a priest, or a ritual murderer, and laying eyes upon it she’d had a surge of hope, that he might be crazy, too. Always she required him to extinguish some, so the light became gentler. When she looked at him his dripping face wavered with the light, and it became the face of her first. He spoke her name to her, but she never answered with his, for fear of a mix-up.

  Sound asleep in her new lover’s bed, she dreamed of her old lover. She stood on a corner well away from her parents’ house, waiting for him to pick her up. It was one of their routines—she’d sneak out her window and fleetly step down the birch tree that grew next to the house and she’d wait for him at the top of the hill. He drove up like he always did, but his dream car was the ruined image of his waking car, and he was a ruined image of himself.

  Get in, he told her, and she did, folding herself tight to squeeze under the sagging roof.

  You’re late, she said.

  Let’s not put this on me, he said. Let’s put this where it belongs. Do you have any idea what you’re doing?

  Don’t you yell at me, she said, like she had when he was alive.

  Do you have any idea? Any idea at all? Is there even a brain in your head?

  Don’t yell at her, said a voice from the back. She looked there and saw her brother, folded up even more extremely than she was. His blue eyes seemed to glow in the dark car. He was whole, not cut or burned or twisted.

  Who the fuck asked you?

  Slow down, said Jemma, because while her attention had shifted to the back of the car the landscape had changed, and now they were hurling down foggy roads lined with trees covered with dying, hand-shaped leaves.

  Are you out of your fucking mind? asked Martin. He let go of the wheel so he could gesticulate wildly at her, and they ran headlong into a tree. She was thrown from the car, or else the car evaporated—she found herself seated on the cool ground watching the tree they’d hit. It was on fire. The hand-shaped leaves were lifted off by the flames and went spinning up into the sky. What is it? asked her brother. What is beautiful about him?

  Rob Dickens was mumbling next to her ear when she woke. He was a sleep-talker. She had already spent a night or two listening closely to his rambling, thinking he might disclose to her some sort of fascinating personal secret, but what he said was only gibberish. He owned an emperor-sized bed, abducted, like the chandelier, out of Belgium. Why a Belgian should require such a large bed, she could not figure—she had had the idea since kindergarten that tiny people lived in tiny countries—unless it was for the reason she required that night, so that she could remove herself to a great distance and yet still be in bed with him. She slid to the very edge of the bed and watched him sleep. She strained her eye in the dark to follow the line of his body from his toe to his head, and then she sought to penetrate his face and his very mind with her gaze, all the while asking herself, what is not beautiful about him?

  He opened his eyes as she watched him.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. He put his hand out to her, not reaching her despite the length of his arm.

  “Come here.”

  “No,” she said, and considered, not for the last time, how she was bad for him. “You will always know,” Sister Gertrude had told her class of trembling third-graders. “You will always know the wrong thing, and choose it freely.” Sister Gertrude was a million years away now; all that time had made her pathetic and small—she was just a nun-shaped nubbin on a chain of nun-nubbins hung in a chain around her dead brother’s neck. But Jemma really had always known the wrong thing, and chosen it, and so she chose it now. Angels should be singing, or devils shrieking, or the walls should shake. No, no no no! cried her ghosts, but she quieted them. What was true to her she put away for what was sensible. What was safe she put away for what would put him at risk. What was lonely, what would redeem her, what would have made her the saint of her own obsession, she put away for selfish need, or for love. She took his reaching hand.

  With her mouth engaged she looked through his legs at the lightning in the window. It flashed through the water—falling so heavily against the glass that she was reminded of the time they’d made out in a car wash—and cast their shadow on the wall of the darkened room. She paused to catch her breath and turned her face to the wall, to see the curious silhouette, the way his neck and shoulders grew out from between her thighs, and how his legs, thrust out from her shoulders so they looked in shadow like her third and fourth arms, shuddered and waved. She turned her attention back to him, but still cast glances synchronous with the lightning so she could see how they made insects, trees, and Eastern deities on the wall, until they rolled off the bed and his mouth came inching up her body, to find her own mouth. Then she only saw his face, closer and closer. When the lightning flashed again she imagined it echoing in the globe of his eye.

  Strange, certainly, that witnessing a delivery should make her need this, but stranger still that she should try to ruin the joy of it with dark thoughts. Always when they were together like this, especially when they were desperately and ferociously together like this, when she really ought not to have the capacity to consider anything but the immediacy of her overwhelming pleasure, still the greater portion of her thought, even as she and Rob clawed and pulled at one another, and stood, and lay down, and stood up, and squatted, and knelt, and stood again, was devoted to her brother, her parents, and her first lover. She had used to think that her ghosts presented themselves in her mind to warn her—again and again and again, every day and night of her life forever and forever—of the obvious: that everyone she loved must die. Then she wondered if they might not be spectators at fleshly events to which they could never again be party, and she found herself savoring the tastes and collisions and knotty tensions for their sake. And finally she knew it was because they were always with her that they were with her at this seemingly most inappropriate time, and it was only her own perverse will that called them out of memory to present themselves. But now she could get it over in a flash, the thought of them. As swiftly as if they were handing her off
from each to each in a frenetic dance she passed among them—father, mother, lover, brother. She spent an instant at each funeral and saw her parents’ caskets, and she saw the box that hid her brother’s ashes, all that was left after the butchery he performed upon himself. And she saw her lover’s face, marred by the obscene reconstructions of the mortician. His eyes had been left open at his weird mother’s request. Jemma had been sure he’d winked at her as the casket was closed.

  Rob pressed his forehead against hers, so hard she thought their heads must break into each other, and their brains would mix like yolks. “Come back,” he said.

  It called to Jemma’s mind a spinning fun-house trick room, the way they rolled along the walls. It would not have surprised her too much to open her eyes and discover herself pinned against the ceiling by Rob’s handsome hips. They rolled against the door. After a little while, when she heard a new noise, she thought at first it was her foot fluttering against the wood, but it was somebody knocking. They grew still, and Jemma wondered if the door was locked. The knock came again, louder and more forceful. The door handle jiggled, and a voice called through the door. “Hello? Is anyone inside? I left my pencil case.” For what seemed like five whole minutes the person worked the handle. Is it so difficult to understand, Jemma wondered, when a door is locked? And then she wondered who carried pencil cases out of sixth grade, anyhow.

  Rob arched his back and neck to look at her—he was myopic and not wearing his glasses. While the door handle rattled he lifted a hand and ran his finger down her forehead, over her nose, mouth, and chin, down her neck and chest and stomach until his finger was resting exactly in her belly button. Even after the person on the other side of the door finally gave up, Rob regarded her silently.