by Chris Adrian
“Stop compressions,” Emma said, leaning over casually to deliver a shock. “All right!” she said as the rhythm normalized transiently, then “Fuck!” when it slipped back into v-fib.
“Some more amiodarone?” Dr. Tiller asked civilly, as if he were asking, One lump or two?
“May as well.” She motioned for Jemma to continue.
“It’s no use,” Jemma said. “He’s already dead.”
“Possibly true,” Emma said, “But not for you to decide.”
“Don’t you smell it? He’s already rotten inside.”
“Compress or go home,” Emma said. Jemma continued, pressing ever more violently on the thin chest.
“I just want to stop,” Jemma said. “I want it all to stop, right now.”
“Get her out of here,” said Dr. Chandra. “Jesus, Emma, you’re a fucking sadist.”
“She’s okay,” said Emma. The child underneath Jemma’s hands was changing with every push, the bloody flower in his mouth blooming in ever more intricate detail, rose, peony, zinnia—Jemma thought she caught the scent of flowers underneath the odor of ischemic gut. The mother called out again, “Regresse, regresse!” The whole family was outside the door now, mixed in with a crowd of residents and nurses and students and a few stray parents—codes always drew crowds. Pickie Beecher’s face peeked out from behind Marcus’s mother’s knee.
“It’s unbearable, what you’re doing,” Jemma said, softly at first, but then she looked right at Emma and shouted it at her face. “It’s unbearable! It’s fucking disgusting!” Emma finally called for someone to replace her. Janie, her only friend among the PICU nurses, who just two nights before had scolded Jemma for nearly writing a fatal potassium order, then hushed the whole thing up so Emma never discovered it, tried to take Jemma’s arm. She shook her off. “Don’t touch me,” she said, and Janie pulled her hand away.
“Hey,” Janie said, shaking her arm. Her hand hung at her side, limp as a filet of beef. “What’d you do?”
“It’s disgusting,” Jemma said again, “and not fair. What did he do to you? Why does he deserve this? Nobody deserves this. You’re torturing him.” And she wanted to ask, of the people in the room, of the air, of the hospital, of the great blue lidless eye of the sky that watched them suffering every day, What did we do to you? Why are you torturing us? She was complaining for herself and for the boy, though they were hardly kindred assaults, to be deprived of everyone you ever loved, and to be violated by well-meaning physicians and nurses, yet somehow in that moment she saw the two of them as suffering twins, laid out side by side, whaled upon by mortality, by long thick needles, and electric shocks.
She was almost crying—her parents and her lover rose again in her mind, mangled, bleeding, and burned, all three of them putting a hushing finger to their lips. Fuck you, she said to them tenderly. Don’t tell me that. And when her brother rose up out of the sea she said, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! and began to weep bitterly.
“Do the fucking compressions, Jemma!” Emma shouted, reaching toward her. Jemma brought her hands down together, two fists, to strike at the boy’s chest. The room lurched and a light flared in her head. She thought it was the crying and the pregnancy, and was sure she was about to pass out. She reached for the passing out, trying to embrace it. If she just passed out then it would all be over, but she couldn’t do it. She was dizzy and lightheaded but not the least bit tired anymore.
“What was that?” asked Dr. Tiller, and Janie said, “I still can’t move my hand!” and Dr. Sasscock, standing way at the back of the crowd, asked, “What’s wrong with her eyes?” Maggie, who had left her bed as soon as she heard the code bell and now was standing near the crash cart, cried out, “I told you so!” and threw a laryngoscope at Jemma, who never even saw it coming, and only realized she’d been hit when blood began to drip down her forehead into her eyes.
“It’s not fair!” Jemma was shouting. “It’s disgusting!” She was striking the boy again, harder and harder, and no one moved to stop her. They were all leaning away from her, the code in full arrest now, shielding their eyes every time she struck his chest, and she realized finally that the flashes were happening outside of her head. Every time she struck, a green light flared out of her hands to light up the room. She held up her hands and looked at them through her tears. Her scalp was bleeding freely, and the blood was dripping down her cheeks to fall on his face and his mouth. She touched her hand to her forehead and understood suddenly that she could make it better. It was a piece of knowledge granted to her entirely apart from her reason. Deduced of nothing, a spontaneous fact, it was inserted into her mind and her heart. Any place else but in the extremity of a breakdown, she would have mistrusted it absolutely. If she had been more herself she would have known right away that it was too good to be true. As it was, temporary insanity provided her with enough faith to give it a try.
Even as she was fixing it, she became aware of the wound in her head as a wrongness. It was a like a note among notes; though she was not aware of it as a sound, she described it that way to herself. As it faded, and after it was gone, other wrongness, different wrongness, captured her attention. She knew it: with her new sense she recognized Jarvis two rooms down as surely as she would have had she laid eyes upon him. Similarly, she knew her cardiac kid upstairs and Brenda. The varied wrongness of the hospital, on the other floors, in the other wards, was a subtle presence in her head; the wrongness in Pickie Beecher, watching in the crowd, was loud as a shrieking mosquito; the wreck of the boy underneath her was a nightmare instrument, a cat-piano, a dachsophone, but the wrongness in Rob Dickens, four rooms down, was loudest of all. She felt the yearning again, understanding that it was not just wanting but wanting them to get better. She wanted them all. She wanted this boy so badly but she wanted Rob more.
“Get out of her way!” shouted Maggie. “Don’t look at the sparkles!” Only Pickie Beecher got in front of her as she passed through the door, but he didn’t try to stop her. He raced ahead, pushing people out of her way until she was standing by Rob’s bed. Pickie took up position behind her, facing the door.
Because she was confused, because she did not know how to manage what was in her, and because she just wanted to do it, she lay herself on top of him. She thought and whispered words that she thought should fix him: Let it be, let him be better. The green fire still flickered over her arm, but it did not touch him. She stood again and looked back at Pickie, who stood near the door, saying nothing now, and looked at her with a blank face. She turned back to Rob and pulled off his blanket; it was an insufficient uncovering. She took his gown and his diaper and tossed them on the floor.
As she laid herself on him again the nurses came into the front of the crowd, and stopped in front of Pickie. “Oh God, she’s trying to fuck him!” said one of them. “She’s gone crazy!” She wasn’t trying to fuck him, though she knew what she was trying to do involved a most uncommon intimacy. Let it be done, she thought. Let it be gone. Let something come down on him and make him new again. He lay under her, heart beating faster and faster, still unconscious, still only breathing with the machine. She stood up again.
A nurse was trying to get past Pickie Beecher. “Maybe we should just let her,” another was saying. “It’s not like she’s hurting him. Maybe we should just give them some privacy.” The crowd was still growing behind them, one by one. Jemma sensed them, wrongness added to wrongness, everyone wrong in ways different from the children, and from Rob, wrong in ways she could barely recognize as wrong, let alone describe.
“Get back, or I’ll kick you,” Pickie said. Jemma lay down again on top of Rob, taking his hands in her own and raising them, over her head, grinding her hips into his, pushing her face into his face. She spoke a different word this time, “No.” She spoke it to his swollen brain, his empty eyes, his spastic limbs. She spoke it to the staring dead eyes of her first lover, to her brother’s eyeless face, to the house burning up her mother, to her father’s livng corps
e reaching and reaching for comfort. She spoke it to the drowning waters, to the correcting God. She’d spoken it before, on cruel nights, on crueler mornings in the days after each of the people she’d loved had died, waking with a corner of the pillow in her mouth, understanding she was awake in the same world she’d slept from, moaning No, no, no for an hour in her bed. She’d wanted so much, then, to have the power that the feeling ought to have given her, to shape her no into undoing, or at least into vengeance, cold comfort better than none. No and no, over and over, forever.
“You may not pass!” said Pickie Beecher. He inflicted a wrongness atop the wrongness that was one of the nurses; it bloomed at the edge of Jemma’s contracting perception, a strobe flash, or a single, high note, a piccolo played by a soprano with a lungful of helium. “No,” Jemma whispered, and “No,” she said. “No,” she shouted, and “No,” she screamed. It came suddenly, and seemed to happen apart from all her pushing and fretting. One moment she was grinding her body into his body, the next she felt like she was floating on top of him, a green sea between them. Cold green fire ran over them both. She pulled at his tube, flinging it across the room. She pulled the bolt from his head and flung it similarly, shattering the glass door, holding her hand up at the blood he spouted. It stopped like obedient traffic, turned around and vanished into his head. A blister of skin formed over the wound.
It was quick. In the time it takes to do up a long zipper she’d poured an ocean of fire into him, soothed his swollen brain, reunited sundered axons, and popped out the plum-sized dent in his skull. He sat up, taking in a deep, whooping breath and making clawing motions with his hands. He opened his eyes but did not notice the room, the crowd, the nurse writhing on the ground with a broken shin, his nakedness. Jemma could tell he only noticed her. “What happened?” he asked.
I hardly know my own part, so why do I feel like my sister’s should be harder? She has always been ordinary. We do not have the same complaints, though she has always been sympathetic to my complaints, even when she didn’t understand them. I say, The world heaps me. She says, I am fat. I say, I am the root of all evil. She says, I am lonely. And she is fat, and she is lonely, and though she likes everybody, no one likes her, while I hate everyone and have a hundred friends.
One summer when she’d had a particularly rough day, I told her it didn’t matter that people she liked didn’t like her; the one person she did like more than anybody else would be her friend—I had promised—beyond the end of time. She thought I meant Jesus, but I told her I meant me.
Repeat after me, I told her, You suck-ass motherfucking cock-sucking pavement-fucking fuck-faced slimy-crotch bitch, go fuck yourself with a moped and shit in your own mouth. I had her memorize eight different phrases and even combine them all together into a marathon-length cuss-fest that she could barely complete without breathing in the middle. If she replied with this whenever someone called her fatty, I guaranteed they would stop.
They’ll just think I was crazy, she said.
But they’ll leave you alone.
It’s easy for you to say. Nobody thinks you’re crazy or fat. You’ll go to eighteen proms and wear seventy-five different tuxedoes and get elected Emperor of Maryland.
Say it again, I said, and she did. But she could not, when challenged, speak the words. So I kept composing cusses for her, and I designed a ritual to make sure it really never did fucking matter what somebody said to her or how they treated her, nothing would touch her and nothing would hurt her because she was protected. One night we went out her window and down to the little clearing where one of our dogs was buried. Kneeling by an arrowhead-shaped piece of slate that marked his grave, we burned candles and beef fat and I sacrificed one of her stuffed animals, an old bunny named Moronica.
Whatever they say, I chanted, let it come back to them. Whatever they say let it be silent. Whatever they say let it matter less than nothing, and let every mean thing they say or do come down again on them a hundred times worse in the after-time. I put a kitchen knife through Moronica, dipped her in wax and fat, and then we buried her. There in the ground she would become a scape-bunny, the absorber and repository of every ill ever done to Jemma, storing it all up like a battery until the after-time, when she would rise to give it back to everybody who had ever perpetrated a cruelty upon her, a truly terrible rabbit.
And the next day she went out in the world again, and nothing was different, but overnight I dreamed of her protected, surviving when the rest of the world vanished in flame, and she was queen of the world when all her old classmates were dead or worse than dead. I could not, and can’t, reconcile my sister with my visions of my sister. And why should I see her, wielding fire and killing angels, and angels bowing down to her, when what I really need are dreams to instruct me in my own purpose?
“Did you hear?” Frank said to Connie over their customary breakfast. “A child was raised from the dead last night.”
“From the nearly dead, actually,” Connie said. “And it was a man. You have always got things just slightly wrong. Always just a little, but enough to totally miss the point.” She smiled at him and took his hand. Their marriage had been in a shambles when they entered the hospital with their daughter two nights before the storm, but the Thing had reintroduced them each to the other’s best qualities, and they had fallen in love again, feeling a little guilty for it, amid all the misery. Their daughter had Crohn’s disease, and came into the hospital to have a fistula repaired, accompanied by both parents not because they couldn’t stand to be away from her, but because neither had trusted the other to be alone with her. They had both been expert slanderers, in their old lives.
“But a miracle, nonetheless,” he said. The angel had made him the usual omelet, asparagus and mushrooms and havarti cheese.
“Well, there are miracles and then there are miracles,” she said. “Raising someone from the dead—that’s a miracle. Saving them from certain death, that’s just good medicine. Baba, did you salt my eggs?”
“Maybe,” said the angel.
“How many times do I have to tell you? Salt on the bacon, pepper on the eggs. What do you say? Was there a miracle in the hospital last night?”
“Every day in this place is a miracle,” said the angel. “You are seated upon a miracle. You live inside of a miracle.”
“A typical non-response,” said Frank. “Deborah! Get out of bed!”
“Leave me alone!” their daughter called back from her room. They had an outside suite on the seventh floor, with a balcony off the room that Frank and Connie shared, intact family-hood being a state of relative privilege within the hospital, and Deb having gotten well enough, after a post-Flood series of surgical complications, to be discharged to a residential section. She was not asleep, though her father accused her of being slothful, and called her schlaftier, German being their secret language, where with her mother it was Japanese. Each of them spoke a different language to her when she was a toddler, ostensibly for the sake of her edification, but she suspected that even then they were getting ready to hate each other with a grand passion, and laying up language in store for the day when they would need to talk shit about each other to her when they were all eating dinner together. Now they kissed at the breakfast table with their mouths full of bacon and eggs.
She wasn’t sleeping, but she wasn’t ready to join her father for Bible study before he traipsed off to his new job as an apprentice radiology tech, or her mother for her walk on the roof before she went to clerk in the NICU. She was watching a movie, one that she watched every day. It was her wedding video, or at least a video of what her wedding would have been like, if the world hadn’t ended, if her boyfriend had lived long enough to propose to her.
She lay on her belly on her bed, feet kicking in the air behind her, and said “Forward,” so the image in the monitor, as big as her window on the opposite wall, blurred and accelerated, until she slowed it down at the reception. Some days she just listened to the blessing of the minister, a bi
g lesbilooking lady in a purple dress that made her look like Grimace the milkshake monster, and some days she just watched when the camera took a slow track along the buffet table, feeling nostalgic for the salmon fillet and miniature quiches that she had never tasted. And some days, when she was feeling up to it, she watched the dancing, hugging her pillow while her new husband—they were twenty-five when they were married and age only made him more handsome—spun her around to a bluegrass tune. She had never imagined that she would have banjos and autoharps at her wedding, and yet from the first time she heard them she knew the angel had got it all just right, just as it had been, and just as it never would be. The exchange of vows never got to her, but somehow the dancing always did her in. While her father called out that her sausage was getting cold, she cried and cried.
Down the hall, in the room she shared with her brothers and sisters, Kidney was lying under her bed, her favorite place to sleep, and the place to which she retreated when she was afraid, or when she wanted to think about something. She had started the night in her bed, cuddled up with States’-Rights, but just before dawn she had started to get a feeling like something important was happening, and so she went down below, realizing as the sleepless hours passed and the sun made its first appearance on the floor, that the thing she was feeling was the end of their time in the hospital. Nothing else could be so big, or make her feel like every next day was going to be her birthday, and everybody’s birthday, and like all the rest of their years everybody in the whole world would spend every day giving and receiving presents.
