The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  Rob Dickens passes him on the ramp, not looking up, walking slowly back to the call room. He got the femoral line but it was a small joy, because the kid was actually doing extraordinarily well and had actually yelled out, “Stop, stop that! Why are you poking me?” as Rob drove the needle into his thigh. He wasn’t supposed to do that. Rob starts crying again as he walks, turning his head into his shoulder and hurrying now, not even sure why he’s so sad—when he tries to think of his mom or Greta or Gillian all he can see is the heart kid’s face, and he should be happy for that kid, and happy that he was asking for ice cream as they wheeled him off to the PICU. He starts to run as he passes the fifth floor, wanting very much to put his face between your shoulders because he knows it will stop up the crying some if he does that.

  I could make a false Jemma, my sister says. Give me a summer squash, he will never know the difference.

  It is not necessary, I say.

  Cruel angel, she says, and sighs. Something wonderful has happened. Already she has put forth her hand.

  I say it too, Something wonderful! A shout over the whole blue earth, loud enough for anyone with ears to hear, but the hospital is still a sadness on the waters, and still my brother is gathering himself up from within the deep, from bits of bone and flesh, an eye here, an ear there, from a hundred thousand patches of skin he is formed to be perfect in his flesh and perfect in his fury and already he is coming.

  Our doctrine be tested by this rule and our victory is secure. For what accords better and more aptly with faith than to acknowledge ourselves divested of all virtue that we may be clothed by God, devoid of all goodness that we may be filled by Him, the slaves of sin that He may give us freedom, blind that He may enlighten, lame that He may cure, and feeble that He may sustain us; to strip ourselves of all ground of glorying that He alone may shine forth glorious and we be glorified in Him? These things, and others to the same effect are said by us, they interpose and querulously complain, that in this way we overturn some blind light of nature, fancied preparatives, free will, and works meritorious of eternal salvation, with their own supererogations also; because they cannot bear that the entire praise and glory of all goodness, virtue, justice, and wisdom, should remain with God. The first part is easiest. How many times have I put off all virtue? Over and over I have rolled off virtue and justice and wisdom and goodness like so many pairs of rubber underwear. Then I stand there, naked, perverse, depraved, and wait to be clothed, but no matter how many hours—you can stand there all night—it never happens. I can look back with my perfect memory and there was never one moment, never one, in my whole life where I didn’t labor under it. The knowledge of my depravity is the only thing that makes me special—not the bad dreams or how I can leave my body on the roof and fly down the river dipping my hands in the water (and they are wet when I come back) or how I can make time slow down or how I know the future or how I can tell the best souls (and I know mine is small and wrinkled, wizened not wise) or how I can make my eyes change color if I stare in the mirror at them for long enough—that I have always always always known, and have never for a moment been able to forget, that there is something terribly wrong with me.

  Vivian walked in the roof garden, on a date with Jordan Sasscock. “Three weeks and two days,” he was saying. “It’s not really very long.”

  “But it already feels like forever,” she said. It hadn’t been a very fun date, though Jordan was the hottest resident in the hospital. She had picked him because she had never seen him glum in all the weeks she’d worked with him, but it turned out to be all happy veneer, and as soon as you got him alone for any length of time he revealed himself to be an obsessive depressive. She had wanted not to think about things but they weren’t ten minutes into dinner before he held up his water glass and said, “I can hardly even stand to drink it.”

  “Not even the length of a rotation,” he said. “That’s how I’ve come to measure time, in four-week blocks. Some are slow and some are quick. This one has been the slowest of all. But I keep thinking, like I did with the tough rotations in residency, that the way through it is the same. You just put your head down and go, and before you know it it’s over.”

  “I can do anything for a month,” Vivian said.

  “Exactly!”

  “But it’s going to be more than a month,” she said. They were wandering on the snaking gravel paths that cut through the grass and flowers. Except for them, the roof was empty.

  “How do you know?”

  “Just a feeling,” she said. She took his hand and led him toward the edge of the roof, where she sat down with him. They looked over into the dark water, and she could hear it lapping at the windows of the fourth floor.

  “Just when I’m sure I believe it,” he said, “I can’t believe it.”

  “I can believe it,” she said. “I’m not having trouble with that anymore.” She nearly told him then about her project, her long list of reasons that would add up to the one big reason. The water called the task to mind, because the two things were similarly huge. It would be like counting the water, drop by drop. With enough time it could be done. “Guess what I’m going to do,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Synthesize a puppy,” she said, because the list wasn’t really a first-date revelation, after all.

  “I tried it,” he said. “All I got was meat and fur. She’s got her limits.” He dug in his back pocket and pulled out a coin. “I’ve been saving this,” he said.

  “Don’t waste it on little old me,” she said.

  “It’s the right moment,” he said. “A nice warm night and a big moon and I can smell fresh cut grass. Who cuts the grass, anyway?”

  “Robots,” Vivian said, because she had seen them one night, purposeful rolling metal balls that hithered and thithered all over the roof.

  “Make a wish,” he said, and flipped the coin into the dark. They both listened intently for it but neither heard it splash. Let me figure it out, she thought, but at the same time, Send me a boyfriend.

  “What’d you wish for?” she asked.

  “What else? For it all to be a fucking nightmare.”

  “It already is.”

  “You know what I mean. How about you?”

  “Same thing, of course.”

  “Maybe if we all wished at once,” he said.

  “Then we would all be disappointed.”

  “Probably,” he said. He took her hand and rubbed little circles in it with his thumb. She took his hand and put it in her lap.

  “Guess what?” she said.

  “What?” It was too dark to see his face clearly, but he wasn’t pulling his hand away. “Three weeks and two days is the longest I’ve gone without sex since I was twelve.”

  His whole arm stiffened and he pulled away. “I should check on some kids,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”

  “Walk you down?”

  “I think I’ll sit a little bit longer. You’re right, it’s nice out here.”

  “See you downstairs,” he said, and he squeezed her shoulder as he stood up, as if to console her for being a forward whore. All the forward whores of the world were not responsible, she had decided. It was not the sex that had done them all in. Not the good sex, anyway. “I was kidding, you know!” she called out after he’d walked off, not turning to look if he was still on the roof. If he was there he didn’t reply. “Not really,” she said, more quietly. I’ve got work to do, she thought, and no time to hold somebody in her bed, to press his bones against hers, or lay his face alongside her face. No time to hold someone as the hospital rocked and spun, and no time to wake up next to someone in the strange pale dawns. She had her pad and her pen in her pocket, so she took it out and wrote in the dark.

  Three floors down Cindy Flemm was riding her IV pole in a big lazy circle around the general peds ward. It is one of the advantages of being four feet tall—when she probably would have been six if her guts worked right—that she could fit
on her pole and go for a ride while her TPN was running in. It set a bad example for the brats, and even though the nurses and doctors yelled at her for doing it she kept on, riding and gliding serenely. They weren’t her parents and they couldn’t very well take away her IV pole and they were too cowardly to chain her in her room.

  Around and around—waiting in her bed for Wayne she got too restless. She’d spent half of the last year in this hospital, and even with the changes in the architecture that came after the Thing, she still felt like she could steer through the halls with her eyes closed. How ordinary it seemed. This was just another night, Carla in charge at the nurses’ station tossing a ball back and forth to Ella Thims in her little red wagon, and Susan and Candy and Andy charting and gossiping at the desks, and an intern in the little glassed-in office talking on the phone. Nobody was too sick—she could always tell by the set of the nurses’ faces, and nothing special was happening. It was like any other of the thousand nights she’d spent in the hospital, until she scooted down to the big windows at the end of the hall, where you could see the moonlight on the water. As she glided through the ward she whispered, “Totally normal,” and as she passed the windows, “Totally fucked up.”

  “You’re going to make yourself sick with that twirling,” Carla said as she passed.

  “It makes me not sick,” Cindy said. “And it’s all I have, since you won’t give me any benadryl.”

  “It’s not due for two hours. You know it.” Carla covered her eyes as Cindy went into a pirouette. “Now you’re making me sick.”

  “Diphenhydramine,” Cindy sang as she went, meaning that Carla should get some for herself. “Diphenhydrameeen!” She carried the note all down the hall. She could sing better than anybody she knew, and hardly ever found the occasion to put forward a whole song, but she liked to put single words or phrases to tunes and stretch them up and down like in opera. “In pain,” she might sing to her intern, or “leave me alone,” or “go fuck yourself.” On her twenty-third pass down the hall she saw Wayne slip into her room and followed him in after one more pass at Carla. “Hey, no midnight vitals,” she told her.

  “Sounds fine, but I have to ask Chandra.”

  “Well, just be sure you ask him with style,” Cindy said, throwing her hand out and flexing her wrist like a big fairy. Carla said it wasn’t nice to make fun of people.

  “No vitals!” she called down the hall just before she closed her door. “I’m fine!”

  “Famous last words!” Carla called back.

  “Now she’s going to come down here,” Wayne said. “You shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “Baby, don’t tell me how to work my nurse.”

  “Don’t call me baby.”

  “Baby,” she said. “Baby, baby.” She sat down next to him on her bed, taking a little while to get her tubing arranged. He had already taken off his shirt. He raised himself on an elbow so she could get an arm under him, and then lay back down with his arms around her but she squeezed him harder. He was the best-fed CF kid she had ever seen. Usually they were blond and thin and pale and looked like they might cough blood on you as soon as smile at you. Wayne was tan, with dark brown hair and blue eyes, and big, with a high wide chest, and arms she could not wrap her two hands around. And he was very hairy for sixteen. He shaved twice a day and had soft hair all over his belly and his chest.

  She closed her eyes and held on, imagining like she always did that they were out on the water and his fatness made him float, and that they weren’t just on the water but suspended in grief, which was a phrase she had overheard from Carla when the nurses were shrinking each other one night at the station and didn’t realize that her call radio was on. Their voices had woken her and she had listened to them talking about how much they missed whomever and how it was all too horrible to be real and she watched the water. Grief was yellow, she felt sure of that, and so she floated in a yellow sea holding tight to Wayne’s doughy back while they floated and rolled. He was kissing her and then polishing her breasts with his big wet mouth and then for a little while she was doing the thing her sister had called playing her boyfriend’s oboe. She would say “I petted his weasel” or “I played his oboe” because she couldn’t say things like cock or blow job but Cindy had no problem with that, and indeed she had gone around in the afternoon quietly singing blow job, blow jooob, pronouncing it now like an Indian lady and now like a little Dutch girl, and she had looked forward all day to the end, the shock and the taste of which she thought was just like touching a nine-volt battery to your tongue. Her sister had said it was like Clamato but Cindy knew she was wrong and wanted to tell her.

  “What?” Wayne said. “What? Why do you always have to ruin it by crying? It’s no big deal. It’s just us. It’s just you and me being together.” She kept her head down there and didn’t say anything, and he pulled her up and kissed her. “Quiet,” he said. “They’re going to hear.” So she pressed her face deep into his chest until she was a little calmer.

  “Why us?” she said finally. “How come a bunch of fuck-up sickies? How come not normal people?”

  “Shut up,” he said. He put his hand over the back of her neck and for a moment she thought he would push her south again, but he just squeezed and petted her there. “Who else but us? We’re fine. I mean look at you. Look at you.” He waved a hand over her broviac line and her scarred-up belly. “You’re perfect,” he said.

  A committee formed. Someone had planned, not for this eventuality, but for something remotely like it: in the event of a catastrophe a special governing body would assemble to oversee the function of the hospital in crisis, its authority superceding that of the regular board. Jemma would have liked for there to have been a button, located in the office of the hospital chief-of-staff, that would have released the pre-selected governors from frozen stasis, but there was no such thing. There was in fact a speed-dial button on the chief-of-staff’s phone, that activated the crisis phone tree, but when someone finally thought to press it, it only caused the angel—Jemma had finally started to call her that, like everybody else did—to sing a lullaby from out of the receiver.

  Of those planned governors only one had been in the hospital on the night of the storm: Dr. Snood, who already had a very well developed sense of his own importance. “At least he’s not the grand pooh-bah,” said Vivian, herself a member of the Committee. “Not officially, anyway.”

  There was no president, no chairman, no grand pooh-bah, but Dr. Snood was considered by himself and most others to be preeminent. He called the first three members to replace his drowned colleagues. He selected Dr. Sundae, an insomniac pathologist who did all the NICU post-mortems once a week between the hours of midnight and six a.m., a lady familiar to Jemma and the other students as the architect of second-year pathology exams that brought the best young minds of the country to the brink of nervous collapse, and someone who would sooner chew off her own foot than be charitable with a test point. He called Dr. Tiller, an intensivist also known as Dr. Killer, not because she wasn’t an outstanding clinician, but because she was famously cruel to residents and students. And he called Zini, the ill-tempered nurse-manager of the surgical floor, a woman in her fifties whose drooping body was always constrained in shiny, tight skirts and blouses, so she always looked to Jemma like she had been packaged by aliens for preparation as a microwave dinner. She was doing a rare favor the night of the flood, having made herself available as a substitute for the junior manager who should have been called in to help deal with the lack of beds in the full-to-capacity hospital. Dr. Snood was known, like most everyone else in the hospital, to hate her, but even he, in his overweening pride, understood that every hospital government, council, or committee must have at least one nurse-manager to dip her sullen paws into the mix of business.

  This tetrarchy of fussbudgets reigned only for a few days before people began to agitate for wider representation. An initial plan for each of the first four to call four others was scrapped when it was met
with widespread indignation, especially from the lab techs, housekeepers, and cafeteria workers, who felt sure that their chances of having a say in things would be slim at best with a committee dominated by nurses and physicians. So names were put forward from among the nurses, residents, techs, cooks, cashiers, janitors, parents, students, and others, placed in secure black boxes made by the angel expressly for the purpose of receiving secret ballots. It was not precisely an election, and the committee that eventually took shape was not formed by an entirely democratic process (the fussbudgets chose from among the proposed candidates), but at least it took some of the sting out of oligarchy.

  Vivian became the student representative, thrust forward by the surviving third- and fourth-years. Vice-president of their class, she was the most conspicuous choice. Raised along with her were Karen, the surviving chief-resident, Emma the NICU/PICU fellow, Jordan Sasscock, three nurses (two from the floors and one from the ER), two parents, a senior lab tech, and the hospital tamale lady, whose selection was less surprising than it might at first have seemed, given that she had been coming to the hospital for twenty years and knew everyone, and that the cashier/cook/housecleaning faction fell into squabbling and was unable to produce a universally agreed-upon list of candidates. The first action the expanded committee took was to call a seven-teenth member to join them: John Grampus, who came reluctantly, kicking against the pricking insistence of the angel.