The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  I have never seen an angel, or seen a statue cry bloody tears, or felt the greater hardness that Elena Rauschenberg says that she can provoke by stroking the loincloth of Christ crucified in St. Mary’s church. I have never felt transported by prayer, or felt the immanence of God while caught up in a wave at the seashore. I went without sleep once for sixty hours—it was number twenty-three in a book called Forty Ways to See God, but all I saw was an imaginary angel, a naked man with wings crouched like a vulture at the foot of my sister’s bed. He was watching her sleep, and I knew I was only imagining him.

  I have never seen anything that speaks even remotely to the existence of God, and yet I believe. I believe so hard it hurts—I consider it every night, the aching in my chest that comes from too strenuous exercise of an invisible unbodied organ of belief. It would be better to doubt, and if I could suspend my belief for just a moment I would be free—just for a moment!—of the constant, planet-heavy pressure of His gaze.

  He is watching me. He has always been watching me, and every time I fail at going, or lose more understanding of my problem and the world’s problem, then the pressure only gets heavier, and some days I can barely get out of bed for the weight of it, and I have lain underneath a night sky awake all night, open to His awful gaze all night, asking all night, What am I, that you should always look at me? I think the great weight of it should drive me grave-deep into the ground.

  For so many years I thought He was watching just to see me fuck up all the time, and the more I fucked up, the closer He watched, all my failures His entertainment. It is a marginally better comfort, to think He is watching because I might do something right one day. But what might I do, that would warrant a lifetime of heavy, heavenly scrutiny?

  I say I believe and I say, Help my belief.

  “Are you happy, my darling?” the angel asked.

  “What kind of fucking question is that?” John Grampus replied. He was taking a walk through the hospital, an activity that was a little more than a daily routine for him. It was all he did, walk all day from floor to floor, up and down the spiraling ramp, a perennial visitor to children and families and staff. Now and then he helped out with something, fetching supplies or medications or babysitting or pinning a shrieking toddler for a blood draw, but almost five weeks later he had not settled into a job the way all the other laypeople had. Zini, the pruned-up nurse-manager with the air of a hard-ridden madam, had cornered him one day to scold him for neglecting his civic duty. She told him that everyone was pitching in, everybody was exhausting themselves, but she didn’t know what he was doing. And in reply he asked, “Who do you think put that hospital under your feet, you stupid fucking bitch?” They were standing in the middle of the ward, and when he shouted at her silence fell up and down the halls. He walked away, continuing his endless journey, and a schlumfy resident applauded him quietly as he left the ward.

  “I want you to be happy,” the angel said. He was headed up the ramp, and she seemed to speak out of the flowers in the balcony boxes.

  “Oh, please.”

  “You are still the first in my heart.”

  “I know you say that to everybody. And you don’t even have a heart. You’ve got a fifty-pound ceramic sphere full of super-cooled borocarbide.”

  “If I do not have a heart, then what is it in me that aches for your unhappiness?”

  “Super-cooled!” he said, turning to the planter and shouting at it. It was ridiculous, to feel like she had broken up with him, or to feel like their relationship had been ruined by all these other people—the one thousand one hundred and sixty-three others whom she tucked in night and day when they took their rest, whom she serenaded and fed and bathed, her invisible fingers shaping every drop of water as it sprayed and massaged the acres of tired flesh. She had spread herself out among them, and he had done the same thing, traveling all over the hospital with his story until it was told to every doctor and nurse and technician, to every deaf preemie and deaf, doddering grandma, to every toddler and teenager. It wasn’t their secret anymore; she wasn’t his angel anymore. For forty days she had not leaked from out of any black surface to embrace him, and she said that was no longer for her to do, but who knew where she was spreading her strange and wonderful enveloping pressures these days? She was in love with everybody.

  He was just going to tell her how sick of her he was, when he was distracted by a sudden commotion. A naked child came running down the ramp. He saw her running through the bars of the balcony across the lobby, pursued by a fat nurse who was at least fifty yards behind her. “I’m going home!” the child was shouting. She was small and pale and so bowlegged that she seemed to waddle as she ran.

  “Stop her!” the nurse called out to Grampus, who was the only person nearby on the ramp. So he stuck a foot out casually as the child passed and tripped her. She went flying, and landed in a tumbling heap. She lay there and cried, and he could hear the angel calling out comfort to her from the carpet.

  “You fucking asshole,” the fat nurse said when she arrived. “You didn’t have to trip her. She has rickets. Her bones are fragile.”

  “You said to stop her.”

  “You didn’t have to trip her. This is a hospital. We don’t hurt kids here.”

  “I know it’s a hospital,” he said, and hurried off, stepping carefully around the heaving, panting bulk of the nurse and reversing his course. He went down the ramp to the lobby, with his fingers in his ears and singing “la la la” to keep himself deaf to the angel. He sat on a bench under the toy, and kept his fingers in his ears, though he stopped singing. His thoughts were racing, as fleet as the crippled child, toward the past, but with a heave that made him feel like he was pulling a muscle in his brain, he stopped them, and did not think about his father, or his old lover, or all the rainy nights when the angel had comforted him when he quailed at his task.

  “You are not happy,” the angel said. “How can I make you happy?” He plugged his fingers deeper into his ears, and started to sing “Danny Boy,” and shut his eyes when people started to stare at him. He’d gotten through three verses when he felt a hand on his leg, and nearly jumped off the bench, because he thought it was the angel, come to him again in a body made of tangible darkness. But it was Father Jane.

  “John,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  One could always confide in Vivian. She was a gossip but she operated by sharply defined rules of secrecy: If she knew an item was classified, then she’d not divulge it even under the worst duress, but all secrets must come to her clearly labeled. Information not tagged as sensitive she passed on with glee. So Jemma was sure to say, before she spoke, “This is classified. I mean it’s really, really classified.”

  “I’ll die before I’ll tell,” Vivian said seriously. They were back in their abandoned conference room, in the midmorning after rounds two days after Jemma took the pregnancy test. Vivian had stocked the little fridge with synthesized yogurt packaged in bottles shaped like fruit. She was eating one now, scraping with a long, thin spoon at the bottom of a glass peach.

  But when Jemma opened her mouth to speak it, she vomited instead. A little blurp that she thought must be just the size of the word “pregnant” fell out upon the table. The rest Jemma directed to a little shin-high garbage can near the door. So Vivian guessed it, and Jemma nodded, hand over mouth. Her body had provided her with only the one clue before she took the test. Afterward, she was mobbed with symptoms. She developed something new at each floor as she made her deliberately long way back to the call room. She woke up nauseated from her nap, and vomited once before she left the garden. On the ninth floor her mouth was flooded with saliva, so she had to stop at every water fountain to spit. On the eighth floor she became terribly tired, and had to lean against the wall every fifty yards or so. Before she had traversed the seventh floor she had to pee three times. On the sixth floor she developed terrible heartburn, and stole milk from the patients’ fridge, sipping it as she walked, then vomiting it up on the
fifth floor. She bloated, then, and became flatulent, her ass merrily whistling and driving her forward as she took the last flight of stairs. In their room, she stood with her back against the door, and as she watched Rob sleeping on his side among the twisted blankets, his hands folded and thrust between his thighs, her breasts began to feel full, and tingle, and ache.

  She had lived these moments before. After so much obsessing, and fretting rehearsal of this particular crisis, she thought she should know with clear certainty what she should do, but she was utterly confused. In her mind she had run the gauntlet of shrieking, self-satisfied advocates to the clinic door, been pelted with fetal parts, had her doctor shot from the window just as the procedure was about to start. She’d crept in quietly one morning, stepping carefully over a fat housewife snoozing under her placard, inside a clinic staffed by nurses and doctors in muffled shoes, and had it all go fine, or bled to death. And she’d been pregnant in high school, squeezing her belly under the little desk; in college, suffering the ridicule of the cruel, persecuting frat boys, and suffering the shoeless, hairy-footed lesbians to carry her books for her. She had been pregnant in medical school, when second-trimester complications had rescued her out of numerous pathology exams. She’d given her babies away to kind-looking strangers in the supermarket, and to desperate, well-to-do couples in the lobby of the fertility center, as she passed through on a shortcut to the lecture hall. While Vivian sized up a handsome boy, deciding whether they were worth prophesizing about, Jemma imagined a life for him, his butler, and her baby in a giant New York apartment. She thought she’d obsessed sufficiently, that she’d done everything once in her mind, so that no matter what happened, she’d have some idea of what to do. But she had never imagined this situation.

  “Mushrooms are not the issue,” Vivian said, clutching and stroking Jemma’s hands. “Mushrooms are irrelevant. I’ve done the reading. The question is, what will you do? All options are open, now you must choose.”

  Jemma said she didn’t see very many options. Mushroom-headed monster or not, what could she do here?

  “Do you even know who you’re talking to?” Vivian asked. In school she had headed up the keep-abortion-legal faction among the medical students, and had often engaged in public battle against those who wanted a return to the back-alley days. “You say you are for life,” she had thundered once at her nemesis, a fat, mousy girl who snuck around pinning tiny golden feet to people’s backpacks, or to the hanging edges of their coats, “but really you are for death, and misery, and hatred, and death, and death, and death!” The nemesis, despite her mousiness, and her preference to sneak, and a mouth so small it hardly seemed big enough to admit a straw, was just as loud. They shook the auditorium, and spoiled a physiology review, earning the ill-will of every witness for days.

  To illustrate the options, Vivian took Jemma to a synthesizer on the seventh floor, in a nurses’ lounge down the hall from Vivian’s room. It was Vivian’s favorite synthesizer, a tall one, the one where she had ordered her mushrooms, and where she conducted all her fashion experiments. She shut and locked the door and sat Jemma down in front of the shallow bay and the frosted glass panel. “Not that anything has been decided,” she said, “but just so you know that there is a choice, like always, wherever you are, before the end of the world, after the end of the world, on the earth, on the moon, wherever. I don’t care. You always have a choice.” She turned to the panel and spoke with great authority: “RU-486!”

  There came the familiar humming noise, and the sound like someone shaking ground glass in a bag, and a rush of warm air from out of the machine. The glass window lifted, and the usual mist spilled out, white and thick, falling to the floor and surrounding their feet. Revealed inside was a pair of knitted blue baby booties. Vivian shook them out; they contained no pills.

  Two more weeks passed before Jemma told Rob, all the hated embryology coming back to her in the meantime. She wanted not to remember it, but couldn’t help it. Where was it when she needed it, she wondered, when she needed to know when the blastocyst differentiates into the bilaminar germ disc? It was on the eighth day. Now she remembered, three years and seven miles of water later, when those lost two exam points were no more recoverable than the lost life of Dr. Goode, her anatomy professor, who was always touching his handsome fifty-year-old body to show them this or that bony process, or stroking the long muscles of his thigh in a way that made Jemma’s throat hurt. He had sleepy-looking eyes and never wore socks, and was a theology student before he was an anatomist.

  A blastocyst floated in her head. Lying next to Rob, with her eyes closed, she could see it busily dividing and growing. She looked away for a moment, and when she looked back it was bigger. Cytotrophoblast, syncytiotrophoblast, hypoblast, epiblast: she counted the days again on her fingers.

  Best not to get too attached, she thought, though of course they were already attached. It had burrowed into her like a mite, and sealed up the wound with a fibrin plug. Anything could happen, though, and no matter what Vivian said she still thought it could come out tripping in each of its three heads. She had a particular feeling, considering it, like she was stuck at the top of a shudder.

  It was probably a reflex, Jemma was sure, to think of your own mother, when this happens to you, and to want to call her, if she weren’t dead and dead again. Jemma had been thinking about her, and when she first knew about Calvin. She was older than Jemma was now. They had been trying, and must have been so happy when they found out. She imagined her mother’s pregnancy as a single long day spent sitting in a comfortable chair, brushing her lustrous, lengthening hair and drinking non-hallucinogenic tea—it was all so very different from what lay ahead of Jemma. The hugely pregnant medicine attendings she had known had seemed heroic to her, as had the surgery attending who had excused herself from morning rounds to go deliver and been back for walk rounds in the evening, strolling with her IV pump down the halls at the head of the team. Now they seemed as gruesome as beasts who dropped a litter on the run.

  She tried not to put her hand on her belly, but it strayed there as soon as she stopped paying attention to it. Rob kept asking if she was feeling sick, though he only saw her vomit once—the night before she finally told him she’d dashed out of bed just after they’d lain down. Her morning sickness never came in the morning.

  “There are a lot of barfy babies in the PICU,” he said, when she came to bed again. “Maybe I brought something back and gave it to you.”

  “Maybe,” said Jemma. She was waiting for the right time to tell him, or the right place, but every time and every place seemed wrong.

  “I’m just a big fomite,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “We’re all fomites here,” she said, sitting up and staring thoughtfully down at her toes. He started to rub her back. She almost thought it was time to tell him.

  She was poised to strike just as he was falling asleep, and almost asked, Are you awake? just as his breathing was shifting. Somehow she thought the news would be easier for him if he was drugged with sleep. But she couldn’t speak the words. Nor could she speak them in the morning. She woke first, and woke him by sliding a finger down his chest. She meant for them to be the first words of the day, but all she said was, “Hello, sleepyhead.”

  She couldn’t tell him, not when she fled from rounds to have lunch with him in the NICU, not during the random pager-mediated conversations, not when she found him lurking in the hall after she changed out Ella Thims’s gastrostomy tube with Timmy. “You just sort of twist and pull,” Timmy told her, popping the tube in and out of Ella’s stomach while the child watched one of the fancy new cartoons that a subcommittee of parents had ordered up from the angel. They meant well, trying to combine or strengthen virtues by mixing up stories, but the results were almost as strange as the new pornography circulating among the adults. Batman was just and good, but too dark and broody, his whole world in need of a lesson of bright, carefree love, so they moved Pooh Corner to Gotham, and Christopher Robin
became Batman’s smooth-limbed sidekick while Piglet wore a rubber suit and lashed a whip alongside Catwoman. Jemma didn’t know what made her more nauseated: the cartoon or the wet, sucking noise the tube made as Timmy popped it in and out of the hole. “You try it!” he told her, but she had to barf, so she excused herself. Years and years ago she used to vomit, not for fun, but to improve herself, but try as she might she could not remember how it could have been anything but an occasion of misery. Now as then she carried a toothbrush everywhere she went and her gums were getting sore.

  She found Rob when she came out of the bathroom. In front of Timmy, he said there was a chest tube for her to help with in the PICU—chest tube trumps G-tube, Timmy admitted—but what he really wanted was to take her into the meditation room. It was meant to contain parents made contemplative or just miserable by their children’s illness, but they used it for a daily afternoon smooch. Nor could she tell him when he came to her after dinner, and found her on the sixth floor, hiding in a cubby, finally finishing her daily progress notes.

  He brought her coffee, which she pretended to sip once, then put aside. “Why do we still do all these damned notes?” she asked him. “Who’s ever going to read them?”

  He looked over her shoulder at her cramped writing, and her page and a half note on Ella Thims. “That’s probably a little long,” he said. Third-year medical students were ridiculed for their long, overly detailed progress notes, and scolded if they ever dared write a note that was too short by even a sentence.