by Chris Adrian
“Or something,” Rob said. “I just keep writing, All better now. I don’t know what else to say.”
“That’ll do,” said Dr. Chandra. “”We have to do something. Everything’s different. Everything! I mean, look at you. Just look at you!” He gave Rob a solid thump with his fist.
“I think people are still getting used to it,” Rob said, rubbing his chest where Chandra had hit him.
“Well, two people aren’t enough for a parade, but we have to do something. You can’t just let something like this pass. Do you know how many nights I prayed, Let it be over and get me out of here and save me from this place? And I always said if it could only come true then I would finally believe in God.”
“I don’t think it works that way,” Rob said. “And there are other reasons to believe, you know, besides just getting what you want.”
Chandra shrugged. “Well, it’s probably easy to believe when you’re dating Jesus.”
“She’s not…” Rob started, but he didn’t know how to finish. He knew for a fact he wasn’t dating Jesus, and yet he did not know how to describe what Jemma was. It was impossible, already, to describe what she was to him. Now it was just something more strange and more wonderful. “I guess it’s all part of the plan,” he said finally. “That’s how I’ve gotten by with it up to now. It’s something so huge… it’s as big as the whole galaxy, or as big as everyone who ever lived, and even bigger than that. And how are we supposed to understand, when it’s that big? How are we supposed to understand, when we live and everybody else drowns? How are we supposed to understand, when somebody does a miracle? You either trust Him or you don’t, and you put your head down, and muddle through.”
“Dude,” Chandra said, smiling and looking happier than Rob had ever seen him. That was a miracle, anyway, to make glum Dr. Chandra grin and skip and clap his hands like an ingénue candystriper. “That shit’s all over. The days of putting your head down and muddling through are over. Something else is coming now.”
“Well,” Rob said, “I see what you mean. But it’s different for me. It’s all part of the same thing. It has to be, or else the bad part is unbearable, and not even this”—he put his palm against his chest, meaning to indicate his body and his health and his life, everything that Jemma had restored to him—“is enough to make up for the bad part. You know?”
“All I know is that there should be a parade,” Dr. Chandra said, scrawling ALL BETTER in a last chart and snapping it shut. “We should throw Tiller or Snood or Dolores out the window. Or even Jemma, but that would be in a good way, like they do to the little short person when a crew team wins a race.”
“Not her,” Rob said.
“But something. We have to start with something.” Dr. Chandra walked to the window, opened it, and threw the chart out.
“Hey, Tiller’s going to throw a fit.”
“Fuck her.” He took another chart from the table and sent it sailing over the water. It skipped once on the surface before it sank. “What’s in here? A bunch of old news.” He threw another one.
“You’re crazy,” Rob said, and laughed.
“It’s not enough,” Chandra said, throwing one more chart. “It’s not big enough. If you help me, we can do something bigger.” He looked around the unit, fastening his eyes on one of the nurses busy redecorating one of the patient bays.
“I won’t help you do that,” Rob said. But instead of grabbing the nurse, Dr. Chandra went into another room and started to drag the bed toward the window.
“Come on!” Dr. Chandra said. “Don’t just sit there.” So Rob helped him wrestle the huge, heavy bed, up to the window, and together they pushed at it while two nurses shouted at them, one discouraging while the other encouraged. The bed became stuck when they had it half out. Rob pushed and pushed, but Chandra backed up and threw himself at the thing, hitting it with his chest and his arms, and then launching wild kicks at the foot rail, so it budged in spastic measures, and finally tipped, and fell. One nurse cheered, the other groaned. Chandra looked at the bed, floating a moment then sinking past the deeper reaches of the hospital, and said, “Good fucking riddance.”
When is a hospital not a hospital? Not when it is floating—that had already been illustrated, Jemma thought, by their first trimester at sea. The everyday business had been executed so routinely, sometimes, that it was almost possible to forget the extraordinary circumstances, and imagine that the I’ve been here forever feeling was just the usual product of an extended call.
You could call the place by any other name, and it would remain what it was—calling it the Excitatorium or the Clown Palace would not dispel any of the terrors it contained nor would any be added to it by naming it the House of Pain, or Chez Poke and Prod, or Elmo’s Grief.
You could take away the fancy machines and it would be lessened but not changed in the way Jemma was thinking of. She’d heard the stories told by well-traveled Samaritan attendings, of IV solutions suspended in used beer bottles, and the dreadful improvised barium enema rigs that must do in a potentially fatal pinch. Jemma removed and replaced these factors and others in her mind, singularly and in combination, long before the event that she thought of as Thing Two, and others were calling the Harrowing of the Hospital, or the Other Thing, or the Good Thing. Pickie Beecher called it the Night of the Great and Awful Jemma.
Take away the children and nothing would change—she knew that, too. The unfulfilled ambitions of an empty hospital make it even more intensely hospital-like. A hundred nurses with no data to fill the many boxes of their flow sheets, surgeons sharpening their knives in anticipation of a feast never to arrive, radiologists staring forlornly at their empty light boxes; in their lonely boredom they’d manufacture a hospital-feeling so intense Jemma was sure it would be palpable and oppressive. Leave the children and take away the sickness and then… what?
When she was stuck deep in her surgery rotation she had daydreamed of destroying the hospital, the surgeons, and surgery in general, dreams in which she set the surgeons’ heads on fire with her mind, or gave voice to a high shriek of protest that made their eyeballs pop, or became so furious and despairing that she collapsed into herself like a black hole and sucked after her into the void the whole building and everyone in it, especially the surgeons, who came to her little by little, piece by piece. She had never dreamed of making them and their art superfluous, but that’s what she had done. Now they had a hospital full of well children, none of whom had lapsed back into sickness despite the predictions of the gloomiest doomsayers of the Committee. So Jemma kept asking herself, Was it still a hospital that they were living in?
She answered sometimes yes and sometimes no, and decided at last that the answer was different for every person. For the children who had thrown off the habits of illness as easily and as thoroughly as their sickbed sheets, the answer was no. For parents and doctors and nurses and students, all those who had been just doing the work for the past three months, who had their sanity in some measure invested in the hospitality of the hospital, the adjustment was more gradual—there were nurses still taking every-four-hour vitals, and half the teams were still rounding, though some days it was very hard to find the children, who were scattered all over the hospital at forty and more activities.
“Is this a hospital or a summer camp?” Dr. Tiller had demanded from out of the audience at a Committee meeting, called on their eighty-first day at sea, to decide what to do with the hundreds of children no longer distracted by the miserable entertainments of their illnesses.
“Which would you prefer?” asked Vivian. Dr. Tiller shook her head, but said nothing. She was one of those people who was having trouble adjusting.
“But we must teach the children,” said Monserrat, for the fifth time.
“And amuse them,” said Dr. Snood. “Though not too frivolously, Carmen,” he said to Dr. Tiller. “And rest assured, drafting a new charter doesn’t mean decreasing our readiness to resume care when that becomes necessary.”
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br /> “Well, don’t expect me to teach basket weaving,” said Dr. Tiller.
“I can do that,” said John Grampus. “I’m good at that.” Jemma, just another observer, didn’t participate in the unanimous vote to formulate a program of education and amusement, and only offered an opinion in the debate over content which followed when Dr. Snood forced one from her. She kept waiting for him to yell at her, for some sort of punishment appropriate to what she’d done, but Dr. Snood was like everybody else—he presented her with smiles and smiles punctuated by a sudden look, caught from the corner of her eye, of puzzled fear.
Over six hours the Committee produced a list of subjects to be taught and diversions to be offered: the standard reading and writing and math; literature in English, Spanish, and Cantonese; biology; chemistry; rudimentary physics; the history of the old world, and a class set aside for speculation on the possibilities of the new one to come; health and hygiene and sex education for the curious and non-curious peri-pubescents; music and art and film appreciation and history, as well as group and individual music lessons (almost every resident and attending played an instrument well enough to teach it) and a band and a junior orchestra if recruits could be found; physical education of the old, dodgeball and rope-climbing sort; gymnastics; ballet; jazz and modern dance; clogging (one of Jemma’s two suggestions to the Committee); tai chi; basketball on a court to be set up in the lobby; soccer on the roof; daily matinees and evening screenings of suitable films (another list to follow); a thespian association of adults and children to present plays and musicals in the rapidly crowding lobby; and other activities—the list, when finished, was long, and hopeful, and the act of composing it left the composers in an almost universally pleasant mood, even Dr. Tiller, but not Dr. Sundae. The body would still not commit to formal religious instruction, though Dr. Sundae struck her fist on the table and declared, “We are afloat in a sea of wrath!” Neither would they adopt Jemma’s proposal that the walls between the surgery suites be knocked down and the entire complex turned into a roller-boogie rink.
There remained, after the business of constituting the list, to find qualified instructors. The hospital schoolteacher, not one to come in on a rainy day let alone a rainy night, was dead. Among the parents there were two teachers, a man who taught third grade and a woman who taught second, who gathered the seven- and eight-year-olds to themselves and drafted lesson plans for the other grades that got rougher toward the borders of middle school and by high school were nothing more than vague suggestions. Their plans were mostly ignored, anyway, by new teachers who substituted enthusiasm and strength of numbers for experience. In the end the Committee isolated teachers or proctors or coaches for everything on the list. Dr. Tiller grudgingly admitted that she had given voice lessons in college.
Jemma, who’d already replicated a new pair of clogs in anticipation of an appointment, was disappointed to hear that the job had gone to Maggie, of all people. She was a secret clogger, and not after all, Jemma discovered on seeing her dance, someone with no joy in her life. Jemma found herself faced with twelve children selected for perceived spiritual or otherworldy leanings who were to receive instruction in Jemma’s “art.” Jemma protested, to no effect, that she didn’t think it could be taught—she’d tried with Vivian and Rob and even Drs. Snood and Sashay. “You must try,” Dr. Snood told her. “It might be different with younger minds.” She liked the children, but it was a disappointment to get another assignment, and to find, just when she thought she was free, that she had landed in another sort of rotation. Everything should be so strange, she thought. Other powers should manifest. A boy should shoot ruby-colored blasts of obliterating power from his eyes—Calvin had always wanted to be able to do that. Or a girl should be able to run through walls. Or every toddler should suddenly be able to float. Or land should appear. But instead the sea remained as endless as ever, and she was the only super-powered person among the population, and, instead of entering into constant celebration, the people in the hospital identified a new business, and settled down to it.
It was not so unusual that so many people seemed to have a better idea of how her gift worked than Jemma did herself. Inside the fancy institution of the hospital, people were used to having opinions in the absence of knowledge, or stating theory with such formidable enthusiasm ignorant ears could be excused for mistaking it for fact. “If it is not science then it must be art,” Dr. Snood proclaimed in a special subcommittee, with just the attendings and Jemma present, who felt somehow like her vagina, or something similarly personal, was being discussed. Medicine was an art, too—everybody knew that, and nobody understood better than the attendings the subtleties of this truth. They were trying to decide what, officially, they ought to do with her—for her disobedience she’d already been scolded and praised by the whole Committee, punished and rewarded with a sentence and suspension of basement imprisonment—and they needed to decide what exactly she had done before they could know how to direct her. Art, an upwelling of spirit, a thalamic burst, a miracle enzyme that facilitated a tendency to health already present in the body: the descriptions flowed freely, but Jemma could not understand how they added up to the resolution that what she did was good, and must be taught, for its own sake, not to mention what a shame it was that the art would be lost if something unpleasant should happen to her.
Pickie Beecher was the most obvious choice for her class, since he was, hands down, the weirdest kid in the hospital. She and Dr. Sundae picked twelve all together—a number Dr. Sundae liked and Jemma considered fraught with unprofitable associations. Jarvis was there in the abandoned NICU conference room on the first day of class, so were Juan Fraggle, and Josh Swift, and Ethel Puffer, dressed in two pairs of pajamas, and still with her eyes and her head painted. Magnolia was there. Kidney and three of her siblings, States’-Rights, Valium, and Shout, were chosen by Dr. Sundae because they said their father had already taught them special healing techniques. Marcus Guzman was there on account of his recent near-death experience. Cindy Flemm was there, but Wayne was not.
Jemma sat with her legs folded underneath her on top of the conference table, facing her students, who sat in semicircle on the floor. Jarvis was scowling, but his was the only unfriendly face in the bunch. They were so quiet that Jemma could hear plainly the noise of the water striking against the window. She closed her eyes and listened to it for a few moments, knowing she must look like she was meditating, but really she was just trying to decide what to say.
“Well,” she said, “I’m not really sure how to start.” So right away she broke a promise she’d made to Vivian the night before. “If you are wishy-washy on the first day,” Vivian had told her during a checkup the day before, “or even in the first five minutes, if you show any weakness at all, they’ll devour you.” She’d volunteered as a teacher’s aide in college, and had many summers of experience as a camp counselor, and said there was something about Jemma’s look that would invite disrespect and abuse. “Show me your mean face,” she’d said, but had only laughed when Jemma scowled at her. She advised Jemma to strike preemptively, to make it plain that her soft face belied the steely educator inside, and had even extemporized a little speech. It’s all about the blood (she was supposed to say, or something similarly hard and frightening) if you don’t understand the blood, then you won’t understand the pain, and if you don’t understand the pain, then you won’t get to the healing. Jemma had protested that it wasn’t really like that, but had promised Vivian that she would present a façade of meanness to her students. She was in the habit of making promises to Vivian in order to quiet her, and looking at the expectant faces of these twelve children, all of whom had suffered her mysterious touch, and so been linked to her in a way she felt she could not begin to understand, it seemed even more ridiculous to roar at them.
“You all probably know about as much about how it happened as I do. I don’t really know how I did it, though I could do it again if I had to. I don’t know how to teach you to d
o something I don’t know how I do, but we can try it. I can show you some stuff, and then we’ll see what happens. But before we do anything else, does anybody have any questions?”
Kidney raised her hand. “Are you Jesus?” she asked.
“I certainly am not,” Jemma said.
“Dr. Sundae says you might be.”
“Dr. Sundae is very impressionable.”
“How do you know you’re not Jesus?” asked Juan Fraggle.
“Don’t you think a person would know if she were Jesus?” Josh Swift countered.
“I used to worry,” said Juan, “that I was the devil, but I didn’t know it. Nobody knew it but the devil, and one day he was going to come for me and say, Son.”
“How could you be the devil and not know it?” asked Josh.
“Because I wasn’t actually the devil, I was his son. But I was the devil like Jesus is God. It was really complicated.”
“My mom always said Jesus would be a girl next time,” said Ethel Puffer.
“And your names are kind of the same,” said Valium.
“And you have long hair like his,” said States’-Rights.
“You’re white like Jesus,” said Jarvis.
“I think you are Jesus,” said Cindy Flemm, “and you’re just too scared to admit it.”
“Or you’re just testing our faith,” said Shout. “Testing who can see you for you who you are, so you know who deserves the goods.”
“I’m not Jesus,” Jemma said again, patiently.
“Okay, Jesus!” said Jarvis, and then they all began to chant it, “Okay, Jesus!” Even Pickie chanted, though solemnly. Jemma called ineffectually for them to be quiet. After asking them for the fifth time to stop she leaped down from her table and hovered over Kidney. She clapped her hands over the child’s head; a silent flare of green fire burst from between her fingers and fell over the girl’s hair.
