The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  That was why Vivian had gone synthesizing at the replicators, presenting the angel-lady with perfect shroom specs, to seek that feeling again. And to help Jemma recreate from her terrible morning and worse day, the whole afternoon spent trying to arrange imaging studies for little Pickie Beecher, for whom Dr. Snood had declared the necessity of a full workup when his guaiac card had turned bright blue. It was the right time of the month, anyway, for a trip.

  “To understanding,” Vivian said, raising her tiny cup in salute. She hated that she could make no sense of the Thing. Of other tragedies people always said they were senseless, and yet Vivian maintained that they rarely were. She could always find a reason for them. She said it was like reverse synthesizing an organic molecule; she took the hideous end products and, step by step, took them back in time to the disparate originals that combined to create them. To all the late horrors of the war she’d reacted analytically, where Rob Dickens reacted empathetically. The two of them were a study in contrasts, on the dreary mornings after a new piece of miserable news had broken. They’d sit all in a row in the lecture hall, Rob on the one side of Jemma, imagining the last thoughts of victims, and Vivian on the other making international connections in her head, and calculating the force of an explosion by the distance it blew an average-sized baby. It had to be the same, with this—if she could just approach it correctly, it would prove vulnerable to figuring, though she knew it was going to be the biggest project of her life. Everybody needs a project, Jemma thought, or a very distracting hobby to get them through this difficult time. How many times had people suggested it to Jemma, and how many knitting starter kits had she gotten, a new one after every death. The medicine itself would probably be enough, she thought. Certainly it was going to keep her busy—she wasn’t sure she’d survive another week with Dr. Snood, and wondered if she’d ever even figure out which child was Kidney, let alone fix her constipation.

  Jemma raised her own cup, pinching the tiny handle to bring it to her lips. The tea tasted not unpleasantly of smoke, but it had a bitter aftertaste that twisted Jemma’s face and made her gag.

  “Hold it in,” Vivian said. It was her plan to let the mushrooms settle for a while here, and then go to the roof, or at least a high room, someplace where they could look down at the water. She put her cup down, and Jemma did the same, placing it carefully onto the saucer. “It shouldn’t be long,” Vivian said, folding her hands in her lap and staring down at them. Jemma put her hands on either side of her teacup. She stared at the table. It was painted with a maze of the sort you find on the back of cereal boxes. In the bottom left corner, close to Jemma’s left hand, a forlorn unicorn wandered among black trees with cruel faces shaped in their bark. In the upper right corner, near Vivian’s left hand, a vapid blond princess cried at a castle window, missing her magic pony. Between them lay yards and yards of squiggle. Jemma traced the path with her eyes, again and again coming to a dead end or else losing her place along the lines, so she’d have to go back and start all over.

  Just as she had nearly followed a true path all the way through the maze, Jemma saw the unicorn rear up and shake its horn at her. “Are you feeling it yet?” she asked Vivian. Jemma hadn’t noticed her getting up from the table, but now she stood at the window. Jemma went to her and asked the question again.

  “We’re in the wrong place,” Vivian said. “We need to find the front. We need to see where we’re going.”

  “Okay,” Jemma said placidly, and let herself be led from the playroom. They creeped, as much as it was possible to creep down well-lighted corridors, and peeked their heads into various rooms on the fourth floor. They were just above the water line. On the third floor you could look up through the water at the sky, like looking up from the bottom of a swimming pool. On the fifth you looked down at the surface, and at particular times of day you could see your reflection staring back through the glass. On the fourth floor the water met the air at about the level of your hips.

  The breaking room was designed originally as a conference room for administrative assistants associated with the NICU—Jemma had been in there once before, for her orientation to the nursery. Its only charms were a picture window, a refrigerator, and a wall poster that featured a cat coupled to an encouraging motto. Jemma doubted anyone had been in there since the Thing. She went reflexively to the fridge and opened it up. Inside were three yogurts, a tub of cottage cheese, and a pale blue container that was discovered to contain, when Jemma opened it up, somebody’s retainer. She shrieked as she dropped it, because she thought it was some fabulous, palate-shaped insect flying at her face, about to bite her with its metal teeth.

  “Hush,” Vivian said. “Here it is.” She had sat on a table underneath the window and put her hand on the glass. Just in the middle, on either side of her hand, the water swept away to both sides. “Come up and figure it,” Vivian said. “This is the place.”

  “Are you feeling it?” Jemma asked again, once she was kneeling on the table next to her friend.

  “Of course I am,” Vivian said. She took Jemma’s hand and put it with her own. “Put your hand here,” she said, pressing Jemma’s palm to the cold glass. “Put it there and tell me why it happened.”

  “I don’t know why it happened,” Jemma said slowly.

  “Yes you do.” She peered closely at Jemma, and even in the dark room Jemma could see that her eyes had become almost all pupil. “You know the reason. Tell me the reason.”

  “There was no reason,” Jemma said tentatively. Vivian squeezed her hand hard, as if she were trying to wring the blood from it.

  “There was a reason. And more than one. There were reasons and reasons. The only question is, which reason. Which was the straw that broke the patience and the promise? Which do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t guess.”

  “You don’t have to guess. You just have to look. Can’t you see it?” Vivian turned her face away from Jemma’s to look up at the starry sky. “Something obscene. Something to push the squash button. I’ll start. I’ll start, then you go, all right? It was the talking babies. Talking butter He could abide, and talking animals, and even the isolated talking vagina did not provoke His wrath. But the talking babies were too obscene. They are called infants for a reason. Speech corrupted them, and could He overlook it? It was the talking babies.”

  “That doesn’t seem like enough,” Jemma said, watching the two edges of water and air. The little waves of the splitting wake shaped themselves like dancers while she watched, flailing silver arms or kicking silver legs before collapsing into foam.

  “Have you seen them? Have you seen the way their mouths move, how wrong it is?”

  Jemma did not reply. As if inspired by Vivian’s tirade, the two edges of water and air had separated at the point where the wake split, and a space like a mouth had opened between them. Jemma listened intently, waiting for the word that would come out of that black space.

  “Or else it was the buffet, the all-you-can-stuff. It was that woman. Have you seen her, her lank hair and her purple lips and her great bulk heaving back and forth from the table to the buffet and back again? She made one trip too many and cost us the world.” Jemma had the curious sensation of listening to Vivian with just one ear. The other was trained only on the parted mouth at the window, waiting and waiting for it to speak.

  “It’s your turn,” Vivian said, but hardly paused before speaking again. “It was the people who dress up dogs and children and take pictures for greeting cards. What else to expect, except utter destruction, when we celebrate the pornographers of innocence?”

  Jemma leaned closer to the window, because she could tell that the word was coming, but that it would be spoken very softly. It brushed faintly against her hearing, but she could not understand it.

  “More likely the suicides,” Vivian said. “One too many of them hogging the death from people who really need it. Now there is enough death to go around.”

  “Shut up,” Jemma said ha
rshly, taking her hand away from the window. “Just shut the fuck up. Maybe it was you, did you think of that?” Vivian put a hand to her mouth, and then she began to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to curse at me.” Jemma pushed her away when she tried to embrace her. Her hands flapped around, trying to get a purchase and draw her in, but Jemma could knock them away expertly. She rolled off the table. Vivian fell forward and put out her arms in a gesture of final supplication. “Please,” she said. “You’re right. It was me, it was me, it was me.” Still furious, Jemma turned on a heel and strode away, not looking back. As she passed through the door Vivian called after her, “But it was you, too!”

  Jemma tried not to look like she was tripping. In her present state of mind she thought the best way to do this was to stride purposely from place to place. Tripping people were dilly dalliers. Everybody knew that. They were distracted by hallucinatory insects and breathing walls, or by their own inflating and deflating hands. Jemma put her head down and took big steps, trying to look like she was on her way to fix a problem, and hoping no one would notice the rainbows that bled off her skin like smoke. She looked at no one, and whispered to herself every few minutes, Keep walking. So sure was she of her purposeful stride, she could not understand why the nurses stared at her as she passed. Only when one asked if she was looking for something did she understand that she had passed up and down the hall on the sixth floor at least five times. She shook her head and passed into the first familiar room she came to.

  Ella Thims was asleep. Jemma stood beside her crib, leaning her head against the cool metal, watching her steady breathing and listening to her ostomy bubble. The child woke and sat up. “Hello!” she said cheerily. She always woke in a good mood, unless she was septic. She stared at Jemma and said it again. Jemma only stared back. Ella laughed at her, then covered up her eyes. “All gone!” she said, and then, “Back again!” when she uncovered her eyes, letting her hands drop to her sides. Jemma covered her own eyes. “All gone!” Ella said. When Jemma uncovered her eyes the child had been replaced by a changeling. Warty, gray, psoriatic, it squatted and rocked in the bed, and wiggled splayed fingers at her. She covered and uncovered her eyes again, and saw a baby elephant, reaching with a double trunk to cover its eyes. It quickly acquired a quality of endlessness, how they went round after round, and how Ella Thims became by turn her mother, her brother, Rob (his beauty was not marred by the ostomies), and finally herself. That was too much, to see a miniature, marred Jemma waving and bouncing in her diaper. She hurried out of the room and into chaos. Nurses were pouring into a room just a few doors down from Ella’s. One of them pushed Jemma in when she paused to see what the commotion was about.

  “There you are!” said another nurse, mistaking her for someone capable of presiding over the emergency. There were five in the room. Surely enough, she thought, to screw in a light bulb, or have a tupperware party, or by themselves save the gray-faced child on the bed from the death that was obviously settling on it. The code announcement came just as a sixth nurse wheeled the code cart into the room, knocking Jemma’s hip as she passed her. It was the angel speaking, “A child is dying, a child is in mortal need.” Three nurses closed in around the bed. One stepped on a pedal that raised the bed up just past waist-height. Another tore open the boy’s pajamas and started chest compressions while a third bag-ventilated his mouth. “O, won’t you help him. O, it is given unto you to save him.” They all looked up at her at once and Jemma saw that the one had eyes as big as teacups, the other had eyes as big as saucers, and the last had eyes as big as dinner plates. “Don’t just stand there!” said the one who was bagging, whose eyes were as big as teacups. She jerked her head at the monitor. “It’s v-fib!” Jemma looked at the monitor above her, at the lines that squiggled in a sweeping pattern for a few seconds, then settled into smooth cursive, spelling the same thing over and over: It was you it was you it was you. From her left another nurse shoved a set of paddles into her hand. She heard the defibrillator whining as it charged up. Please, please, she thought, please do not let him die. “It’s v-fib,” said the nurse at the head again. “Shock it!” Jemma did as she was told. She placed the paddles, one on the boy’s chest and another on his side, and yelped, “Watch out!” before pressing the buttons. He jumped in his bed, and she thought she saw a green light flare from under the paddles, and felt it, too. It was all part of her trip, she was sure, how she could feel the electricity traveling out from her belly to her hands, and how the light seemed to become a word in her, and she could not be sure if it was sounding only inside her head or if the angel was speaking it, too, “Live! Live! Live!” All seven women in the room turned at once to the monitor, where the mad squiggles settled into the blips and spikes of a normal sinus rhythm.

  “Good job,” said the nurse whose eyes were as big as dinner plates, just as the PICU team arrived, and Jemma suddenly remembered her name: Candy. She didn’t look like a Candy—she was hugely tall with black hair and weird skin that seemed translucent even when seen through eyes not scaled with magic fungus. Candy was short for something Russian and unpronounceable. Jemma surrendered the paddles back to her, then stepped backward as the others surged forward, and the mass of bodies parted to let her pass. She turned around outside the door just as Rob came running up, his code pager still singing at his hip.

  “Were you running that code?” he asked her.

  “Of course not,” she said, looking down. He touched her arm, and she was afraid he would lift her chin with his hand, and discover how her eyes had become spinning pinwheels, but Emma, the PICU fellow, called for him to hurry up if he wanted to get the femoral line.

  “See you soon,” he said, and slipped by her. Jemma hurried off the other way, at first doing a slow shuffle, contemplating the lingering green taste that was everywhere in her body, and then running, because it seemed suddenly irresistible and necessary to run, and then, once she was sprinting, because she felt pursued. She didn’t know what it was, and she was too scared to turn around and face it. She tore around a corner, colliding with a child as tall as she was. When their heads bonked together Jemma saw the noise flash in the air all around them, bright and white. The boy, thin and black, fell back on his ass, just like Jemma, but he was up on his feet again in an instant, as if he had bounced. Jemma had never seen him before. She scrambled to her knees.

  “Are you all right?” she asked. “I’m so sorry!”

  He looked down at her, peering into her eyes. Jemma looked away.

  “You’re all fucked up,” he said.

  “You’d better go. It’s not safe here. Something’s coming, but I can hide you. Come on.” She stood up and grabbed his arm.

  “Don’t touch me, you nasty junkie whore,” he said calmly, shrugging her off and walking away.

  “Not that way!” Jemma called. “It’s coming from that way!” He turned the corner, and she could not muster the courage to step around it and call after him again. She ran, instead, feeling the thing behind her, the skin of her back burning as it got closer. She flew down the stairs three and four steps at a time, and took a winding path through the fourth floor back to the room where she’d left Vivian.

  “Vivian!” she said hoarsely, trying to whisper and shout at the same time. “There’s something behind me! I think it’s the why. I think it’s the reason. It’s coming to get us, because we were thinking about it. We called it to us, don’t you see? Like when you say Nancy Reagan’s name seven times into a mirror and she leaps out to kill you with her big red claws!” She called Vivian’s name again, but there was no answer, and as she looked harder through the darkness she saw that the room was empty. Jemma pushed the table against the door and sat with her back against the window, her head just at the surface of the water. She watched the door, trying not to imagine the form that the thing must take as it came to destroy her, imagining instead what it would do to her. She saw her blood smeared over the walls and windows, and her guts
strung up, over and under the struts of the suspended ceiling, and her head preserved in the little brown refrigerator, with somebody else’s retainer stuck in her mouth. She watched and watched, as the thing never came, until she was finally distracted by the advent of a cold bright light. Her shadow appeared on the floor as suddenly as a monster, but it did not frighten her. She felt as if the tea were nearly out of her, by then. She turned and saw the full moon peeping around the top edge of the window. She had noticed before the face in it, but it had never seemed as sad as it did tonight, and the crater mouth had never seemed opened wide in horror like tonight. Over the next hour, while Jemma sat perfectly still, not sure if she was even blinking, it sank down into the water, as if it were seeking to drown. When it was fully immersed Jemma at last closed her eyes, and felt herself sinking too, and in the last fling of her trip imagined the moon a stone tied to her foot, the glowing opposite of a balloon, so as it sank in the water it pulled her after it in slow degrees, farther and deeper, back to the former surface of the world, and below that, and below that, and below.

  You get heavy, I get light. I rise and rise and rise, through the dark water and the bright hospital and the blue air, and stretch myself over everyone, listening to Vivian weeping again—now she is all sadness and no rage. She cowers in the linen closet in the oncology ward, so sorry for what she has done, and for what you have done. She has convinced herself that you and she are responsible for the whole thing. It’s a pain no one should have to bear, and my sister, sensitive to such things, gasses her gently with strawberry-scented sevofluorane, sending her to dream of fragrant plastic ponies and live for a few hours as a child in the old world. Dr. Snood passes by the closet, on one of his own late-night walks, trying to decide whether or not to continue with the tradition of grand rounds—maybe there is a better name, or a better thing altogether, a new tradition he should start, grander rounds, a shared time of useful consciousness, or a town-hall style meeting to discuss issues of hospital governance—and thinking of his wife. Her picture has been hanging all day in his mind, and he considers again how it would have been their anniversary in three days. It is the first time in five years that he has remembered it.