by Chris Adrian
“Where’s the fucking FFP?” Emma asked, not looking up.
“She doesn’t need it,” Jemma said, raising her hands and taking a few unsteady, jiving steps toward the bed.
“Are you crazy?” Emma asked, and then noticed who had spoken. She opened her mouth in surprise, but kept compressing ever more vigorously. Jemma felt but did not hear the cracking of the girl’s ribs. “You’re not supposed to be here,” Emma said flatly. One of the cracked ribs was scraping the pleura of the girl’s lung, putting a feeling in Jemma that was no easier to abide than the noise of nails on a blackboard. When Emma stopped compressions it was a relief. “Well, don’t just stand there,” she said.
I’m not, Jemma wanted to say, but as she approached the bed she found she could not talk at all. Her head fell back on her shoulders, her eyes rolled up toward the ceiling, and she moaned, overwhelmed with the green fire, which was stirring in her belly now like the worst nausea. She didn’t need to see the girl to find her; her illness was blazing, bright and wrong—it grabbed her, it commanded her. Jemma fell the last foot or so, her hands fastening just above and below the girl’s left hip as she landed on her knees beside the bed. Jemma’s mouth opened on its own, wider and wider until the fire came out, preceded by a bass, vibrating urp, a sound she had never made and did not know she could make.
It went up in a green fountain, broke against the ceiling, and came down, not like rain, but like a falling river, sweeping Emma and the nurse aside. The fire burned more violently than before—Jemma saw the ambu bag swinging wildly back and forth at the end of the ET tube before the tape on the girl’s upper lip curled up like a waxed mustache and the whole apparatus flew from her mouth to bonk Emma on the head, making a pain that registered in Jemma’s head as a dull blip—but it burned silently, and where Jemma knelt it was very quiet. Inside the girl it was very quiet, too, the silent aftermath of a final argument between the girl and the visiting liver, which Jemma understood, as soon as she touched her, she had rejected as utterly as an unsuitable lover. Jemma found herself arguing with the rest of the body, advocating for the liver, extolling its many virtues (and hadn’t the liver always been her favorite organ, the bright maroon spot in the dreary semesters of anatomy, physiology, and pathology?) and arguing that the body should take it back. She imagined herself in pajamas and pigtails, sitting in a room whose walls still held a few posters of kittens in baskets, where not all the stuffed animals had been banished under the bed to nestle against the pornography and the marijuana tin, where the panties of innocence and experience lay twisted together in the dresser drawer. She imagined herself sitting on the bed next to the body, dabbing now and then at the bleeding eyes with the tail of a stuffed tiger. He’s just so great, she said, meaning the liver. You guys belong together, really. He’s really good for you, and you’re really good for him. Everybody was talking about you two, about how well you went together. People were talking about homecoming. She went on, extolling his handsome, unique vasculature, his capacity to store glycogen, the marvelous complexity of his cytochrome p oxygenase system. The praise fell on uncaring ears. Jemma herself was not entirely convinced, liver lover though she was. She had argued with similar half-heartedness, years ago, in bedrooms similarly reflective of liberation and corruption, for the sake of unworthy boyfriends who had wanted another chance. And she had listened to similar arguments made by others on behalf of her first lover, and caved to them not believing them. This girl was made of sterner stuff than she; her mute rejection ended up convincing Jemma, so she turned to the afflicted liver, suffering almost to death under the lashing fury of the girl’s immune cells, and said, Who do you think you are, anyway? Have you no shame, sir?
Holding the poor thing in her mind, she understood what she must do: not convince the body that it must accept the unacceptable, but redeem the insufficient, wrong thing. Boyfriends could never be changed, only exchanged, but this liver was hers to remake. She gave it a shake, as if to say, Shape up, and it did. It put off weary failure and became strong and quite literally new—she burned off its old surface proteins and sugars and copied new ones off of the neighboring cells of the body. Intrepid T cells suddenly realized they were doing wrong, like someone who wakes from a dream of rage to realize they are punching their mother in the face. They gave up their work of destruction and slipped sheepishly into the bloodstream. With the liver jumping in her mind like a little shepherd dog, Jemma fixed the girl. The liver made clotting factors that Jemma multiplied by ten, one hundred, and one thousand, and rushed them in streams to all the bleeding places. It seemed to make a noise, like a grunt, as it tried to raise the oncotic pressure in the girl’s blood, to suck back the fluid that had given her a swishing, beach-ball belly. Jemma helped, and the belly collapsed. The girl arched in her bed as the fire raged in and out of her, burning the yellow out of her skin and eyes, unstitching the scars from her belly.
The fire contained inside her once again, Jemma felt seasick. Closing her eyes made it better, but then she could only walk into the wall. The big nurse took her hand and led her to the next room, and Jemma discovered that it was nice to have a helper in this enterprise she had thought would be solitary. Irene was the nurse’s name. Jemma had known it, but did not remember until their hands met. She was a smoking nurse, with a little emphysema, which Jemma took care of in the hall—she was so full of fire that she could not imagine that she couldn’t spare some for her helper, and in fact the only part of her that was weary was the part that could have held back—and a lazy thyroid, which Jemma infused with vigor as they approached the next patient, an infant recovering from a bilateral enucleation for retinoblastoma. Jemma opened her eyes on his eyeless face, and looked deep into his empty sockets. She saw his eyes rolling toward her from a great distance, two perfect white stones approaching bigger and bigger from the horizon. At last, greased with fire, they were rolling stationary in his head, and when they stopped, perfect clear blue matched and lined up with perfect clear blue, she half expected candy or quarters to come pouring from his mouth.
There was a double trio of craniosynostoses: two Crouzon’s, two Pfeiffer’s, and two Panda syndromes. Jemma wrapped each head in bandages of green fire, which muffled the screams of the children as their bones split apart and shifted, and their heads molded out of their Quasimoto shapes. Brains and minds constrained by the misshapen skulls sprang suddenly free of idiocy. There were a few other children stuck partway through a series of surgeries now never to be completed by dead genius hands, like a three-year-old boy born as jawless as an ancient fish, who’d been temporized with a strange, bony handle like the stiff beard of Tutankhamen—as Jemma fixed him a dozen chins surfaced and sank in her mind, collected on account of a relatively innocent fetish, staring at stranger boys in classrooms and supermarkets and wanting to bite their chins. For these few patients Jemma completed additions, but for most of the children on the seventh floor she replaced deletions. To a thirteen-year-old girl with a half a lung taken away on account of a carcinoid tumor Jemma restored tissue that shined swan white and billowed like curtains. She returned the gut of a three-hundred-pound seventeen-year-old who’d gladly suffered a gastric bypass then nearly died when a partially digested burrito leaked past loose staples into her abdomen. It made for a strange sort of barbecue, cooking that fat in green fire. It sizzled but did not smoke, sublimating into fire, not air, that turned and helped consume what it had just been. She confined herself in the two-chambered hearts of the cardiac kids, imagining new doors, and opening them onto new rooms. Why only four chambers, she asked herself as she worked, because she could just as easily imagine six, eight, ten, and twelve chambers, super-hearts with more room for blood and more room for love, but she restrained herself, though it was a little unsatisfying to construct a merely normal heart.
By the time she had finished on that floor she was burning worse than ever. She could not swallow the fire again, or put it away, and it almost blinded her usual senses. Irene escorted her down to
the next level, sensibly deciding to take the elevator. When it opened the chime seemed a gong to Jemma. It unsteadied her and rang in her teeth. A crowd, all curious and mostly friendly, was waiting for her. “Anybody coding?” asked Irene.
Nobody was coding, but Ella Thims was infected again. Jemma was led to her, and she glimpsed her before she touched her, lying in her crib, naked but for her ostomy bags, staring up at a motionless mobile and emitting her septic cry. Jemma picked her up, holding her over her shoulder, as if to comfort her, though she knew what she was about to do would not be comfortable. At the first pat on the girl’s back, the fire struck, and sank in. Ella screamed, her usual septic complaint breaking apart as she voiced it into something more ordinary but just as loud. The ostomy bags burst as their contents boiled, and the plastic melted and blew away among the observers like shreds of tangible smoke. There was much to make right in her. Jemma tried to go system by system, but found she could not restrain herself, and could not be tidy about her work.
Jemma rolled her up, undoing the bastard corrections of the surgeons. The ostomies closed as her ureter and gut sprang elastically back into her belly, and she rolled up worse than she’d ever been before she was born, legs and pelvis folding over each other until she was half child and half ho ho. It was not a comfortable state, but Ella was too shocked to breathe, let alone scream, and she hung that way not even for a whole second before she sprang straight again, exchanging regression for progression, unrolling into a whole girl. Jemma dropped her, but her fall was slowed by a net of fire that extinguished as her feet hit the floor. She jumped and screamed, and stuck her bottom out at the crowd, bending over so everyone could witness the creation of her anus. A tiny green mouth opened in the blank space, then belched forth a cyclone of flame that Ella, shaking her ass now in what looked less like pain than a dance of exultation, fanned over the whole room, so the observers threw up their hands and ducked their heads, and felt surprise at the coolness of the fire.
In Tiresias Dufresne’s room she and Irene got a surprise. Just past the door, Irene was shoved back as Jemma was pulled into the room, falling on her hands and knees. The door slammed and was blocked with a dresser that struck Jemma’s shoulder as it was pushed over the carpet. When Jemma stood up Tiresias’s mother struck her in the face, again and again, no ladylike slaps but full fist punches, right and left and right again, Jemma’s chin pointing this way and that, and fire flying from her mouth to hang on the unliving walls and die there. She hardly felt the punches—for all their strength it felt like being slapped with a heavy pillow, and she could barely see the fists flying at her. What she saw very clearly was the lady’s grotesquely dilated heart. It seemed to hang in the air, shining from within a giant body made of shadow. It was ailing, and it cried out to its proprietor and to Jemma, saying, Stop, stop. Jemma could feel the coronaries closing and closing, and hear the heart’s desperate shrieks as they rose and rose. It was really rather a meek heart, she thought, unsuited for residence in a fearless glorious bitch. Jemma could not tell if she was asking a question or making an accusation, she only heard the words, over and over: “Would you take away my baby, take my baby!” The heart shrieked so high it seemed to be singing, and then it began to warble as its steady fast rhythm degraded into fibrillation. The lady managed one more punch before she finally clutched her chest and fell forward, carrying Jemma with her to the floor.
She might have crushed her, but before her great weight could settle on Jemma’s chest she rose up on a pillar of green fire. She struggled at the ceiling, shouting and cursing, and wriggling in exact imitation of her fibrillating heart. It was a pleasant way to strike back, Jemma thought, at those who assailed you—with cruel healing fire, causing the worst pain and giving a sweet gift. Jemma touched her everywhere, because she was everywhere ravaged, and she fell back to the carpet a well woman. Jemma rolled aside just in time, and rose unsteadily, crawling up the side of Tir’s bed, as his mother lay on the floor, keeping very still for somebody sobbing so loud. Tir himself was easy to make right. His mind was already reaching and reaching—all his life he’d been reaching for it—for the body that was just beyond its grasp. Jemma merely kicked him into his own reach. He sprang from bed and stripped off his clothes, white flannel pajamas crawling with grinning monkeys, then jumped up and down on them where he’d thrown them in a pile. After half a minute of it he stopped, breathing heavily, and looked up at Jemma. “I hate those fucking pajamas,” he said. The dresser finally fell over, just missing Tir’s mother’s leg, and witnesses poured into the room. Jemma was aware of Tir kneeling down to poke at his mother’s shoulder with his finger before the fire obscured her vision again.
They had another surprise, more pleasant, in Cindy Flemm’s room. “She’s seizing!” someone cried behind Jemma, as the expanding sliver of light from the door fell over her trembling legs. But she was not seizing. Moving up, the light caught Wayne the fat CFer crouched between her thighs, his hair dripping, and his round shoulders shining with sweat. It was charming, Jemma thought, how they took so long to notice they were being observed. The curtain of fire was opening and closing and opening. Jemma saw them look over at the crowd in the door. They did not spring apart, but very calmly began to untie the hopeless tangles of their IV tubing.
“Get off me!” Cindy said, when Jemma had rushed them, her hands skidding on their slick flesh.
“I can’t move!” said Wayne, thinking she was talking to him. It was strange, but not particularly difficult, to do two at once. The fire and her mind split into distinct streams, one for Cindy, one for Wayne. Jemma considered, because they were still connected, how she could weave them into a single, fantastic creature, something that finally could be self-loving but not selfish, a whole world sufficient unto itself. But she restrained herself again, and with one half of her mind stretched new gut like taffy for Cindy while the other stretched itself over Wayne’s every cell, to instruct them in the proper regulation of transmembrane chloride concentrations. They were already screaming, and rushing fire cascading from the bed to the ceiling hid them, so no one but Jemma noticed that they punctuated their rehabilitation with a tremendous orgasm. Jemma, embarrassed, felt as if she were conducting the thing, though it was not anything that proceeded from her. She took her hands away from them, sharing for a moment their sensation of falling, and retired back into the arms of another guide.
Jeri Vega’s mother was the only one to actually hand over her child to Jemma. She was waiting in the door of their room, staring impatiently down the hall. “Finally!” she said, when Jemma came to the room, and shoved Jeri into her arms. Jeri, not her usual calm, glaring self, was crying, and she only cried louder as Jemma burned her. Her giant, fibrotic liver receded over her guts, and settled, small and soft, underneath her ribs. Jemma, used now to instructing recalcitrant livers, undid the enzyme defect within a single pass of her attention. The hair on Jeri’s back and legs and shoulders all stood up straight against the fire. When Jemma gave her a single, rough shake it all detached, and floated gently to the floor. Jemma bent a thought at her single eyebrow, seeking to divide it, but it resisted her. She only succeeded in making it look a little less sinister.
The rest of the floor went by very quickly, for all that each fix seemed to go on forever; when Jemma was touching a child, she felt like she had always been burning them, and like she would always be burning them. But really each one took less time, perhaps because Jemma was getting better at what she did, and her imagination, become lithe in the fire, was quick to construct paradigms of healing individual to each illness. A little Russell-Silver dwarf, eight months old but only as big as a duck-pin bowling ball, was the last on the sixth floor. Jemma played a game, tossing her back and forth from hand to hand, and with each toss she got a little bigger, until it was a great chore to heave her the short distance from hand to hand, and then she was merely holding her in one hand, then the other, and finally her hand was trapped under the plump new bottom.
On th
e fifth floor the doors of the PICU were closed against her. At the head of a big crowd now, she kicked clumsily at them.
“Who’s there?” someone asked.
“The fucking candyman,” said Emma, who was bearing Jemma up now. “Who do you think?”
“We’ve decided not to let her in.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“These kids are really sick. You can’t just come in here and mess with them. You can’t just…” The muted noise of a scuffle came through the doors, and then they parted, revealing Rob Dickens.
“Sorry,” he said. He took Jemma from Emma, and led her into the unit. Through gaps in the curtain blowing in her head she could see nurses and doctors and parents restraining each other. Janie was holding Maggie by her arms. Maggie didn’t struggle, but she scowled and said, “You’re all going to be very sorry!”
“Take me to Jarvis,” she whispered to Rob.
“He’s pretty stable,” he said. “There’s…”
“Him first!” she said, so he took her. The boy’s feet were sticking out from beneath his sheet, covered with fuzzy hospital socks. Jemma removed them and took his big toes in either hand. Except for the ventilator-driven movement of his chest, he was totally still. It seemed like a crude operation, what she did, stuffing with fire-fingers the portions of his herniated brain back up into his skull, no more elegant than pushing the stuffing back into a broken pillow. But it worked, and when she stroked his hot swollen brain it shrank down. She perceived the lost neurons popping back into life as lights coming on in a city seen from a distance. An exhortation to his pancreas, a stoking of its nostalgia for the lost beta cells, called them so vividly into memory that it required only a nudge of flame to make them real. They released such a triumphant chorus of insulin that Jemma found herself groping after his plummeting blood sugar, grasping and raising it just in time to spare him a seizure. He began to wake, bucking against the ventilator until Rob pulled the tube. Jemma considered his perfectly healthy body and was unsatisfied, because there was still a wrong thing in him, a shadow on his brain cast by a past horror. It mocked her when she tried to touch it and lift it, and when she sought to know what it was she could only see it as an obscure shape, like a monster under a blanket. She could not burn it out, or undo the past, but she imagined that she straightened out some of the places in the boy’s brain that went crooked under the shadow. It all failed to make him more friendly. He sat up, drew his fist across his mouth, looked around at the crowd around the bed, and launched a right hook at Jemma’s face. The punch was wide. When he tried again, Emma sat on him. Jemma left the two of them bucking on his bed and turned away, hooking herself to Rob’s arm again.
