The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with it. You’ll like me better, after I’ve gone.”

  “But I’m scared.”

  “Good. It’s scary. Going is scary. Important things are scary. But it has to happen. You’ll see. You’ll understand. Are you ready?”

  “No!”

  “Are you ready?” The flickering candles made his frown look like a monster face.

  “Okay.”

  “All right then,” he said, pulling their father’s straight razor from his pocket. “Here we go. All you have to do is close your eyes and think, Let him go, let him go, let him go. Do it now. You have to say it eleven times slowly, one for every year you are and one for every year I am. Do you understand?”

  “Can I have some of my cake?”

  “Not yet. But after I go I’ll be able to touch things and turn them to cake. Ready?”

  “Ready.” She closed her eyes and started, trying to say it just in her head but the words spilled out of her mind and she heard herself whispering, “Let him go, let him go.” And she added “Jesus please let him go” because she thought that was who would be in charge of such a request.

  “Good,” he said. “Keep going. Don’t open your eyes.”

  And she wouldn’t have, except that he said not to. So she saw him cutting carefully on his chest, one long line from his shoulder to his hip, and now another on the other side, and she ran from the room, screaming as loud as she could, straight down the hall and down the stairs, and into the middle of the party that had used to be her party. She stood in a circle of her parents’ friends, screaming and screaming until her father picked her up and muffled her mouth with his shoulder.

  “Good God, Jemma,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “She had a nightmare,” Calvin said. His shirt was on and he looked like nothing unusual at all had happened. And he was looking at her, his eye to her eye, and she was sure that she heard him speak then without moving his lips. Don’t tell.

  “I won’t,” she said to him.

  “Won’t what?” her father said.

  “Get any cake,” she said.

  “It seems to me that somebody’s had too much cake,” her father said, announcing it to everyone, and suddenly they were all laughing at her.

  “I’ll take her back up,” Calvin said. When her father put her down Calvin held out his hand and she took it. He led her up the stairs, one step at a time, and when she saw the candle glow at the end of the hall she thought they would go back to his room. But they went back to hers, instead. Her cake was sitting on her night table, the candle barely still alight.

  “Blow it out,” he said.

  “But the thingie.”

  “Ruined,” he said. She started to cry again. She hadn’t ever totally stopped. “Just eat your cake,” he said.

  “Let’s try again,” she said. “I won’t scream.”

  “Too late. Now it’s not time anymore. Now it’s just another night. Now it’s just a candle and now they’re just cuts and now it’s just a cake. You better blow it out or you’ll miss your chance for a wish.”

  She bent her head and struck, remembering to wish this time, wishing as many wishes as she could hold at once in her head: Let it taste as good as it looks, let there be a pony under my bed tomorrow morning, let the toilet speak to me, let the cake never end, let me and him share it all night tonight, and let him never go, not anywhere, not ever.

  One thing which ought to animate us to perpetual contest with the devil is that he is everywhere called both our adversary and the adversary of God. For, if the glory of God is dear to us, as it ought to be, we ought to struggle with all our might against him who aims at the extinction of that glory. If we are animated with proper zeal to maintain the kingdom of Christ, we must wage irreconcilable war with him who conspires its ruin. Again, if we have any anxiety about our own salvation, we ought to make no peace nor truce with him who is continually laying schemes for its destruction. But such is the character given to Satan in the third chapter of Genesis, where he is seen seducing man from his allegiance to God, that he may both deprive God of his due honor, and plunge man headlong into destruction. Such, too, is the description given of him in the Gospels, where he is called the enemy and is said to sow tares in order to corrupt the seed of eternal life. In one word, in all his actions we experience the truth of our Savior’s description, that he was a “murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth.” Truth he assails with lies, light he obscures with darkness. The minds of men he involves in error; he stirs up hatred, inflames strife and war, and all in order that he may overthrow the kingdom of God, and drown men in eternal perdition with himself. Hence it is evident that his whole nature is depraved, mischievous, and malignant. There must be extreme depravity in a mind bent on assailing the glory of God and the salvation of man. This is intimated by John in his Epistle, when he says that he “sinneth from the beginning,” implying that he is the author, leader, and contriver of all malice and wickedness. But that’s me. I couldn’t write a better personal ad myself—depraved, malicious, and malignant seeks same for mysterious purpose. Years and years I spent carping at the ruin of the world—as if innocent fallen creation was oppressing me—never realizing (and I’m supposed to be so smart?) that it was my own ruin, that it all proceeded out from me, all the corruption, all the brokenness, even the lies—I told them myself; I send it all out and it comes back, magnified a thousand times, a punishment for me.

  Rob knew it was stupid, to miss someone who was still alive, when so many people were dead. Every day he spent time looking over the water, remembering his sisters and his mother—for ten minutes or twenty minutes or a half an hour he would stare, now and then mumbling a prayer very softly (he was praying over the water but didn’t want to give the appearance of praying to the water, though there were some who were doing that already, people who discovered once the world was drowned that worldwide catastrophe had all their lives been one of their secret desires, and who treated the killing sea like a god) until his pager went off, inevitably, summoning him to a phone or back to the unit. He never went more than a couple of hours without whispering a name, Gillian or Malinda or Gwen—the last his mother’s name, which he had never spoken while she was alive. He thought of them on the hour, but he didn’t pine for them like he did for Jemma.

  Most of the time she was only three floors away, but it felt like she was on another continent, and if they happened to be apart for a whole twelve-hour shift, he grew sadder and sadder by the hour. He learned the difference between sadness and grief that way, missing his girlfriend and missing his family—it hurt in different places. Missing his mother and his sisters was a dull ache—he would never get used to it, but he was already living with it. Everybody was already living with that. But he felt Jemma’s absence more acutely, a sharp pain in the bones of his chest that, when it was raging, would only go away when he pressed her against him.

  “I love you,” he’d say to her, in some closet or empty conference room or in the cold rooms where they stored the blood. It seemed so much more urgent now, to say it all the time. There was a pressure that rose from way down deep in him, which those words safely vented, and yet more and more that was not enough. He would put his cheek against her ear and say it, and still there would be the pushing from inside, so he’d have to add, “So much,” or “More every day,” or else just say it again and again, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” until she squirmed away.

  He was on call in the new combined unit, and little urgencies kept him running up and down the stairs that connected the NICU and the PICU all night long, but when his need was great enough, he slipped away down the hall, telling the nurses he was just running down to the lab to track down some results. He and Jemma had failed to synchronize their call schedules, so she was home sleeping, or just as often sleeplessly wandering the hospital, when he was working. He went in very quietly. The room was dark and she lay quite still on their bed. He meant just to watch
her for a while, to touch her would be to wake her, and then he would have to explain what he was doing there. But as soon as he sat down his pager went off. He was as quick as any intern on the draw, his hand flying to his waist to quiet the thing before it had barely peeped, but it was enough to wake her.

  “You again,” she said, opening her eyes and then closing them again. She turned and put an arm across his lap.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “Tell that fucking nurse I said to shove a preemie up her ass.”

  “They’re being nice tonight.”

  “Huh. Must be a full moon. What are you doing here?

  “Nothing.” She was quiet again, and he was sure she had fallen asleep, and so he said, “Hey… hey… I…” But her hand shot up to silence him, quicker than he had silenced his pager.

  “Don’t say it,” she said.

  Down the hall and up two stories, Vivian and Ishmael were sitting chastely on the edge of her bed.

  “You’re special,” he said.

  “Not like you. Only one of you in the whole hospital.”

  “I don’t feel very special,” he said. “Not in a good way, anyway. I just feel weird. Didn’t you see everybody looking at me?”

  “Of course. You’re famous.”

  “Who is that guy? What’s he doing here? Why did he live, instead of my brother?”

  “Maybe they’re glad to see you. Glad that somebody else made it.”

  “Or instead of my father. Or instead of my uncle.”

  “Maybe you are somebody’s uncle. You haven’t met everybody yet, have you?”

  “Why did he deserve to live?”

  “I think we’re all wondering that,” Vivian said. “Each of us about everybody else, and each of us about ourselves. And maybe we deserve it like people deserve a punishment, you know? Maybe it’s not even a reward, to be bottled up here. Maybe somebody somewhere else is on the good ship.”

  “Sorry to be sad. I didn’t mean to bring you down. I was having such a good time, until just now.”

  “Me too. I still am. It’s okay. You don’t have to be happy all the time. You wouldn’t fit in here, if you were. We’re all fucking miserable, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  He did not reply, but he took her hand in his, and they sat that way for a little while.

  “Guess what?” she said finally.

  “What?” he said, turning his face to look at her.

  “You’re beautiful,” she said. Which was not at all what she had meant to say. That wasn’t something she was accustomed to saying to men, especially on a date. And when they said it to her, she would say, “I know,” a reply which effectively shut down such unprofitable and boring conversation. But Ishmael’s face seemed to her unaccountably lovely just then, so sad and so earnest and yet somehow more than perfect in every line, a collection of lovely shapes that added up, just in that moment, that actually made her feel as if her heart was skipping a beat.

  “Not like you,” he said, and kissed her. They had kissed before, but not like this—as soon as his lips touched hers she knew that they would be having sex within minutes.

  “I don’t usually get like this,” she said to him as she pulled at his shirt, trying to get it over his head, breathless at the prospect of seeing him naked, and thinking for some reason that she wanted to uncover him completely, clothes first, and then the layer of sadness he seemed to have wrapped himself under that evening, and then his very skin, because every covering layer was only hiding a more startling loveliness. She was practiced at sex—sometimes she felt like she’d been doing it forever, but she’d hardly ever been so excited as she was now.

  “Me neither,” he said. “I mean, I don’t think so. Or I do… wait.” He put his face in her neck and then dragged it down her body, straight past her breasts and her belly and into her lap, and from down there he spoke again in a muffled voice. “I mean I think you’re my first. Oh yes, definitely.” And doing it, he said, “I’ve never done this before!”

  Dr. Chandra lived next door, but he wasn’t listening. The walls weren’t thick, but they’d never permit a sound to slip through, though a couple might shout or sing together at the top of their lungs. He was sitting in his bed, which was just as nice as Vivian’s bed. He had leaped at one of the new rooms as soon as the angel had announced that they were available. This was the sort of thing he had always missed out on in the old world. He never got the bottom bunk, or the nicer apartment, or won the door prize. And this place was much nicer than anything he’d had in the old world—the big bed and the fancy sheets and the soft thick rug would have been out of his league. He finally lived someplace that had a balcony and a fireplace and a window in the bathroom. But he was hardly ever there, and even when he was, it did not make him happy, or even contented, in the way that he had supposed it would. This was his day off—not really even a day, it was only eighteen hours—and like with all of them he spent it decorating and redecorating, trying to get the place right.

  “You just need someone to share it with,” the angel told him, because he had just been decorating again and telling her how it was all still not quite right. “Then it would be perfect.”

  “Shut up,” he said, but fondly, because even though she got him in trouble not waking him up in time, and even though he strongly suspected that she was kind to him only because she had to be—because God forced her to be that way or because she was programmed to practice an utterly undiscriminating kindness—he still considered her to be one of his few friends.

  “You’re a handsome boy,” she said. “And you have so much to offer. I can think of a dozen men who would feel blessedly lucky to date you.”

  “Oh, please,” he said. “I do not like these walls. Saffron? Mustard is more like it. I wanted to feel like I was surrounded by Dalai Lamas.”

  “Would you like to see these men?”

  “Hell no,” he said. “Show me the paint samples again.” She did as she was told, flashing solid blocks of color on the television screen, but faces began to pop up between colors, a nurse from the NICU whose name he did not know, a physical-plant man, totally bald though he couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, the big Samoan from the lift team. “Stop that,” he said.

  “How about this one?” She showed him Jordan Sasscock.

  “Oh please,” he said. “Totally out of my league, not to mention totally straight.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” she said. “Some of us can hear his dreams.”

  “You’re too much.” He put a pillow over his face and closed his eyes. “Never mind the paint, just turn out the lights. I’m going to sit here and suffocate.”

  “Let me help you dream, then. Just while you’re waiting for that special person.”

  “None of that,” he said. But after she turned off the lights he took away the pillow, and he didn’t object when she started to show him pictures of an imaginary date, and an imaginary life, and imaginary comforts. Until he fell asleep he watched a slideshow, pictures of him and Jordan Sasscock on some kind of in-hospital vacation, at a fancy dinner in some dark room, walking close to each other on the roof, both of them too discreet to hold hands and yet in picture after picture Jordan was punching him affectionately on the shoulder. He would not look when she showed them in bed, except at the end, when he lay with his head on Jordan’s chest, both of them sound asleep, their faces slack and puffy, bathed in morning sun from the window on the balcony.

  “Behold your happiness,” the angel said, “and do not cry.”

  Jemma conducted a census of her own, not of numbers but of types. Others, thinking, like everybody did, of the precedent, asked themselves, where were the animals? They looked out the windows into the empty ocean and some asked the angel, What was the crime of the panda, that it should be eradicated? All she would say was that they were preserved, leading to speculation that this meant they were preserved in the mind of God, or that they were preserved in a deep, airtight cave
under the ocean, or that somewhere out there on the sea another hospital was floating, twin to this one in every way except that it was stuffed full of ailing and well pandas. The precedent was in Jemma’s mind also, though not because it brought to mind the innumerable animals drowning in innocent pairs. She found herself thinking in twos as she looked at her fellow survivors. Among the children it was obvious that of even the most obscure illnesses two had been preserved—there were a pair of Pfeiffer syndromes, a pair of intestinal lymphangiectasias, a pair of lymphocyte-adhesion deficiencies; only Brenda, it seemed, was totally unique in her affliction. That this should happen in a place that had a whole ward devoted solely to the problem of hypoglycemia was not entirely strange. But Jemma looked further to see other pairs: a stylish nurse, the one with the great big ass, who inhabited the sixth floor had a twin in the PICU who wore the very same pair of rhinestone-encrusted granny glasses. There was a civilian Dr. Snood, father to one of the NICU babies; both men had the same blue eyes, looked down the same proud nose at people in the very same way, had the same leathery skin and the same awful hair. There was a pale girl in the cafeteria, a little big, with bleached hair and large brown eyes who could have been twin to Jemma before she died her hair red. These cases were superficial and obvious, and probably, Jemma thought, meant nothing. She wanted deeper pairings; not necessarily romantic, but fateful. Like would will to like and execute a destiny together.

  Those pairs were harder to find. She liked to think, sometimes, that she and Rob made one, and that Vivian and Ishmael might soon represent another, and that Dr. Snood and Dr. Tiller were somehow yin and yang and fuss and budget to each other, and when they came together would make something perfect and prim and utterly unbearable, and that Father Jane and John Grampus could do great things together, despite their mutual disdain for the opposite sex and the fact that Grampus was sort of dating the angel. But the angel seemed to be dating everybody, and lately Jemma had seen John Grampus wearing a new hangdog look.