by Chris Adrian
“Is that your final opinion? Is that your professional opinion? Have you got a professional opinion yet? You’re just a little student. I don’t mean anything by it. But it’s hard, you know. It’s just hard, to see him like this. I mean look at him.” Jemma looked. The child was bouncing again in his bed and shouting “bloopee” at the television in a spray of graham cracker.
“He looks okay,” Jemma said.
“Is Dr. Snood here? Is Dr. Snood coming? Has he come already? Will you tell him I’m waiting for him? Did I tell you the poop is smelly again? You should smell it, it’s awful. He went three hours ago but it still smells like it in the bathroom, if you want to come. I thought I was going to die. It even seemed to bother him, and it never bothers him, not unless it’s really, really bad. And it’s really floaty. My hair still smells like it. You should smell it. Smell my hair, then you’ll know.” Jemma’s pager sounded just as the lady was pushing her head toward her.
“Oh boy,” Jemma said, “it’s an emergency!” She flashed the number on the display and said, “I’ve got to go.” As she fled the room, she called back that she’d return after the x-ray was done.
“Bring Dr. Snood!” said Ms. Sullivan. She started to pursue Jemma down the hall, but Jemma had learned that if you actually ran from her she wouldn’t follow. If you walked she’d follow you for up to twenty minutes, even into the bathroom. “It’s really quite floaty!” she called out
“I believe you!” Jemma called back. She ran to the nurses’ station, slowing down as soon as she was out of Ms. Sullivan’s line of sight. She filled out the x-ray requisition and dropped it off with the clerk, then continued around the desk and down the hall to the next room and the next child. Jeri Vega had already had a liver transplant, but was waiting for another. She was one of two children on the liver transplant service, part of the GI service and therefore on Jemma’s team. Dr. Snood was not a transplant doctor, and paid little attention to Jeri. Her problems were chronic, not acute, and she’d been hospitalized more to move her up the transplant list than for her chronic rejection and liver failure. “It’s a sea full of livers,” her mother had said, standing at the window and looking over the water. Her daughter had a unique metabolic defect that had poisoned her first liver. She was the only girl in the world with it, the product of a mutation so rare, shy, and retiring that it required cosan-guinity to bring it out: Jeri’s father was also her great-uncle.
Jeri was a very hairy five-year-old, partly on account of her immune suppressants, and partly on account of her extraction. With her bushy black head of curls, thick synophrys, downy mustache, and hairy cheeks, she looked like a Sicilian Annie. Today Jemma thought she looked a little more yellow than usual. Her mother said it was just the light. Jemma listened to her chest, heart and belly, and felt her big, useless liver. When Jemma tickled her she didn’t laugh, but only gave Jemma a bored look.
“She’s tired today,” her mother said matter-of-factly. “Maybe she’s got an infection.”
“We could look at some blood.”
She shrugged. “Let’s watch her.”
“We’ll talk about it on rounds. Her vitals have been fine.” Jeri’s mother shrugged again. She was another mom reputed to be difficult, but she’d always been nice to Jemma, and her management plans, when Jemma passed them on to the team, only rarely drew ridicule from Dr. Snood. Jemma would have liked her more if she did not have a tendency to lurk in the corners of the room, squatting in the darkest shadow, seeming to size you up.
“Have any more bodies floated up?”
“No. No more.”
“And the one, is it still alive?”
“Ishmael was just fine when I saw him last.”
“And that was long ago? Was it days? Something could have happened, yes?”
“It was earlier this morning,” Jemma said. She’d seen him in the gift shop, when she’d gone by for her morning fistful of gummy bears. He’d taken a job as assistant to the volunteer while he waited to remember what he’d done before the Thing.
Ms. Vega stood up out of the corner, took Jeri from her bed, and stood her up by the window. Jeri leaned against her mother’s leg and looked back at Jemma with her huge black eyes. Her mother did a very professional imitation of someone casting a line out into the water. Jemma thought she must have some kind of mechanical apparatus in her mouth, so precisely did she make the noise of a winding reel. “Jeri!” she said excitedly. “What am I doing? I’m fishing for a liver. Oh, they’re biting!” She hauled mightily on her imaginary pole, then pretended to lose it. Then she fell on her daughter, tickling her maniacally. Jeri looked bored with it for a few moments before she burst out laughing. “There,” said her mother. “Now she’s better. You want to have a try?” Jemma approached slowly, and tickled cautiously at the still-hysterical child. As soon as she touched her Jeri calmed and glared at her.
“You’re a bad tickler,” said her mother.
Jemma had woken up with the sense that she was forgetting something, and the feeling worsened through the day. She thought Pickie must have given her something—a sense of unease for an anniversary present. She had obsessively checked her scut list, the row of tasks, each saddled with its own empty box to be checked off or filled in when the task was done. But by the midafternoon she’d done everything but look at Sylvester’s chest film. Down in the dim, cool reading room, looking at the film and waiting for Dr. Pudding to arrive, she felt nagged almost to exasperation by the feeling. It made her more nervous than usual when she tried to read the film. Dr. Pudding made her nervous anyway. He was ancient and fit, a sporty mummy who had run marathons and swum in the frigid bay and had won the national over-seventy wife-throwing championship three years before. There were attendings who wore their spite on their sleeve, like Dr. Tiller, the professional counterpart to raging Helena Dufresne. You could tell she hated you the moment she looked at you. Others, like Dr. Pudding, hid their disdain under a pleasant veneer, but it seemed to Jemma that these types hated no less, and no less passionately, and five minutes with Dr. Pudding almost made her long for Dr. Tiller’s honest fury, or a refreshing dose of Dr. Snood’s plain, old-timey smarm.
“Shadows,” he whispered, looking very dried out in the cold, weak light from the reading box. “Shadows on shadows, Dr. Claflin. Can you make sense of them?”
“I see a smudge,” Jemma said.
“A smudge? Do you mean a blob? Do you mean a smear? Or do you mean an infiltrate? Do you even know what you mean, Dr. Claflin?”
“I see an infiltrate,” Jemma said. “Right there, behind the heart.”
“Do you really?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said confidently.
“Do you think it could be normal anatomy?”
“It’s too fuzzy.”
“Some of us are fuzzier than others. How many films have you read, that you know what’s fuzzy and what’s not? How many, Dr. Claflin?”
“I haven’t really been counting.”
“One, two, three,” he said, pointing at each of her toes and then her fingers and counting up to twenty. “More than this? How many times has piggy been to market?”
“Maybe a few dozen.”
“How many have I read, do you think?”
“Many more,” she said, looking back at the film.
“Thousands and thousands and thousands, Dr. Claflin. Now, what do you see in this film?”
“I guess it’s normal.”
“You guess? Is that what you’ll write in your report?” He picked up the dictaphone receiver and held it out at her. She could hear the tinny voice of the angel: “Name me, Jemma Claflin. Oh, give me a name and I will serve you.” Dr. Pudding frowned and hung it up.
“It’s normal,” Jemma said.
“Wrong,” said Dr. Pudding, clapping his hands in front of her face. “If you see it, never let anybody talk you out of it.” He smiled at her, his face in the dim light a tight ghastly friendly mask.
“Thanks,” Jemma said, realizin
g as she left the room that she had just thanked him for trying to humiliate her. But shame hardly distracted her from her anxiety; it got worse after the hurried lunch with Vivian and Ishmael, and persisted through the evening and the night.
“Are you awake?” she asked Rob, a few minutes after he had come in and collapsed next to her without undressing. He was clammy and smelly but she clung to him anyway, her anxiety palliated a little by the pressure of his bottom against her hips.
“No,” he said.
“Something weird is happening,” she said.
“Understatement of the year. Understatement of all eternity.”
“I mean particularly. I think I caught something from Pickie.”
“Scabies?”
“Crazines. “
“You’re not crazy,” he said.
“You haven’t even heard my symptoms,” she said. “I have this feeling…”
“Like you want to drink some blood?”
“Like I’m forgetting something hugely important.”
“That’s an intern thing,” he said. “Did I dose that drug right? Did I make that kid NPO? Is the chest tube on suction or water seal? It’s just normal.”
“Something bigger,” she said. “Like something’s wrong and I’m not doing what I should do about it.”
“Exactly. It’s an intern thing,” he said. “Congratulations, Dr. Claflin. My little baby’s growing up.” He scooted closer against her and said it again, his voice trailing down as he spoke. “Welcome to the club… always worried… always about to die… it’s all you can do sometimes to not fuck them up worse…”
“That’s not it,” she said. She didn’t speak again, and within minutes he was snoring, but she asked herself over and over, What is it? A variety of problems presented themselves to her as she lay in the dark: Jeri was so very hairy; Sylvester’s pneumonia was sure to prove resistant to the single agent therapy upon which Dr. Snood had insisted; Dr. Chandra was still sleeping too late, and she had figured out that morning that he made up some of his lab results, but hadn’t told anyone of her discovery; her parents were dead and her lover was dead and were they waiting even now for her to join them?; she was not what she should be, she had not done what she was supposed to, this was obvious, inescapable fact; Calvin had a vision for her that she had never understood let alone fulfilled—don’t follow me but follow me your time will come behold my feast behold my offering behold the human grace but sister yours is the harder part; she was inferior to Rob, he loved her better than she loved him, purely, deeply, truly in ways that she had reserved for and lost with her dead, and he was a better doctor, like Vivian was a better student and a better doctor and a hotter mama, both of them were better because they cared more for the work, and subscribed with perfect honesty to the Committee ethic, they just did the work while Jemma just pretended and prevaricated, rounding with false vigor, presenting with false enthusiasm, caring with a false heart, no wonder Snood hated her, he saw right through her; Rob and Vivian were better friends anyway, and better people, open to receiving others into their circles of wonder and grief, sharing their hope and their fear over beer or tea or one of the strange new juices Vivian was always ordering up out of the replicator mist, while Jemma said nothing, they were already part of the project and she was a bystander because trusting is the first deadly sin, sharing is the second; the world had ended, after all, and wasn’t that a big enough problem, and wasn’t anxiety just punishment for a person who said, La la la, it was over already, for me, for a person who felt nothing and cared nothing for what was lost, and who, though she was on the boat, had still managed somehow to miss it? She submitted herself to all these problems in a spirit of open humility, yet nothing changed in her anxiety. These things might be true or not but none was the secret bother.
She sat up, exhausted but totally awake, lifting Rob’s arm to smell deeply of it, then let it drop. She could bite his ass (gently) and not wake him, but if she made the faintest peep of a pager-imitation he’d be up in an instant, reaching for the phone. She got out of bed, put on her shoes, and went looking again for her mystery boy. It had been a couple days since she’d searched.
But she felt the same if not worse after an hour of it, failing to catch even a glimpse of him. She had always had a hard time mustering sympathy for the victims of panic attacks, patients who slouched into the emergency room short of breath, with chest pain and tingling in their lips and fingers. You were supposed to ask them, Are you experiencing a crushing sense of doom? Now, with her hands and lips starting to tingle, and a bubbling sense of anxiety rising ever higher in her, she was better inclined toward them. She paused by the blood bank, examining a dirty sock abandoned in the hall. It was too small to belong to the child she sought.
She heard a scream and the noise of breaking glass. Maybe Pickie was conducting a raid—she ran to the blood-bank window. The teller was cleaning up a spill. “It’s all right,” she said to Jemma. “Just some clumsiness and a waste of some prime O neg.” When Jemma saw the blood gleaming against the linoleum two thoughts bloomed in her head: first she remembered blood on the green linoleum of her parents’ kitchen; then she realized her period was late.
She felt equal parts “Aha!” and “Oh no!” Surely every moron with a functional uterus was able to keep track of these things, even the smallest-brained furry mammal knew when she was late. But Jemma had never been late before, and the only time it had ever been even a little different was a month before—the flow had been a little decreased, and the color a little changed. Now that made sense, too. She suffered from none of those entities whose names sounded like the names of evil Greek queens: dysmenorrhea, menorrhagia, menometrorrhagia, no horrible cramps, no bloatiness, no sourceless rages or crying spells. Since she was fourteen it had not ever demanded much attention from her.
And she was cautious: even during years of celibacy she stayed on her OCP, and dutifully replaced the condoms in her cabinet as they expired, and expired, and expired. Even at the first call-room encounter, she and Rob Dickens had used a condom. She always had one available, in her wallet, or her purse, or even, sometimes, in her shoe. Vivian had taught her well. She could lay out the rough shape of the years of her sex life in her mind: there was no spot of recklessness, in that regard, anywhere in it. Yes, witnessing a birth put her in the mood for sex, but she still had the most awful fear of pregnancy.
“You look a little pale,” said the teller. “Would you like some tea?” She worked alone all night long, in a lab that was isolated from the core lab, and was always trying to get people to sit down and talk when all they wanted was to take their blood and run.
“Tea!” Jemma said. “Oh, fuck!” She was thinking of Vivian’s mushroom tea, and the pictures of monsters she’d seen in her embryology class, and of limbless, eyeless babies floating out of teacups on beds of soft mushroom steam.
“What’s wrong with a little tea?” the teller asked. Jemma ran off without answering.
She’d made some acquaintances during her insomniac peregrinations of the hospital: nurses on various floors, ward clerks, the tamale lady, and techs in the core hematology and chemistry labs. Ten techs were working the night of the storm; now six worked by day, and four at night. She found the one doing urines, a woman named Sadie, and pretended to want to learn how to do a urinalysis so she could get close enough to the urine pregnancy tests to swipe two. Sadie was thorough, and had three urines batched already for testing. She went through each of them with Jemma, who had to pee furiously because of her question, and because of all the pee she was looking at, and because she had been drinking potent synthesized espressos all evening in an effort to flog her memory to give up what it was hiding.
When she got away from Sadie she went toward her room but veered away when she got to the door and she remembered Rob was still inside. She hurried to three other bathrooms, proceeding with the cautious but hurried steps of a girl about to wet her pants. None of them were empty: in two she found gossiping n
urses, in another an anonymous person in red slippers with intestinal distress. She wanted and needed to be alone to do the test, so she picked up a flashlight from the sixth floor and went to the roof and peed on the dry ground beside a blueberry bush, taking ten milliliters from the middle in a plastic cup. She had done pregnancy tests before. Two weeks in a teen clinic and a procession of panicked fourteen-year-olds had made her an expert. It seemed like witchcraft, messing with your own pee among exotic foliage, under the light of a full moon, in the middle of the ocean. She sucked up a cc with her stolen pipette and applied a drop to the blank window, set the timer on her watch for three minutes, and turned on the flashlight. At first she kept the light on the test, and her eyes closed, but the monsters were still flashing in her head. She opened her eyes and turned off the light. The test, small and round, gleamed like a piece of fallen moon, but she couldn’t see what was happening in the window. “Bar, bar, bar,” she said. “Minus sign. Negative.” There were lots of reasons to miss your period besides being pregnant, and two days was not very late. Great stress was a reason. No one would fault a period for being late on account of the end of the world. She stood up and pulled down her pants to look at her spotless underwear, a gift from Vivian who was synthesizing her own line of lingerie. The timer sounded.
Jemma knelt again and raised the light, shining it down and blinking. Later she’d think her eye had tried to humor her, because at first she only saw the flat horizontal bar. But when she blinked again the window flickered and the vertical bar was there, dark, unbroken, blue, and undeniable. The image seemed to expand, the cross growing bigger and bigger, not in the air, but in her mind. She shut her eyes to block it out, but still it grew, as big as a mouse, a cat, a dog, a horse, a house, a hospital. It hung over her and cast her into deep, blue-black shadow.
She’d never been fainty, not as a child witnessing near brainings or facial deglovings, not at the news of death after death after death after death, not in gross lab, not during rectal disimpactions, not picking maggots from the feet of aged diabetics. But now she swooned like a helpless, petticoated weakling, falling back among the dusty rivulets of her pee with her pants around her thighs. The flashlight came to rest under the blueberry bush, lighting the underside of its leaves. Jemma, not awake and not asleep, watched the blue cross as it continued to rise and expand and triumph over her.
