by Chris Adrian
“I’m curious, is all.”
“Sorry. You’re the competition. Anyway, she’s still mad at you. I probably shouldn’t be talking to you at all.”
“Are you mad at me too?”
“She’s my best friend,” Jemma said.
“I didn’t mean to hurt her, you know.”
“I think everybody says that.”
“I didn’t even realize what I was doing, sometimes. It just happened. She didn’t believe me.”
“Neither do I,” Jemma said. The reel jammed. He took it from her briefly to fix it, then handed it back. She hadn’t quite understood the depth of Vivian’s wound. This was a girl who went through boyfriends like Jemma had used to go through sugary cereals, and yet Jemma had never seen her so angry as when she confirmed her suspicions by asking the angel if Ishmael was sleeping around, and she generated another list, name after name after name. “More evidence of the change,” Jemma said aloud.
“Pardon?”
“Nothing. Regardless of what I think, you’re the enemy. I can’t tell you a thing.”
“Okay,” he said, holding up his hands and smiling. “Sorry. I think she’s going to do very well, though. I get around, you know. And I listen. What else have I got to do? Teaching three-year-olds how to finger paint doesn’t take up much time. I’ve sort of been polling while I campaign, and everybody’s pretty excited about her.”
“If you say so.”
“Honest. Sometimes I don’t even know why I bother hanging my posters. But I have to try, at least. It’s only the second thing I’ve been sure about, since I woke up. The first one was Vivian. Now I know I have to run, even though I’ll probably lose. Queen Vivian. All hail. I like the sound of it. Thanks, by the way. I never said thank you, did I?”
“For what?”
“For everything. For what you did. I can’t tell you how glad I am not to be a fucking nurses’ aide any more. I kept hoping I’d remember what I did before, so I could do it again, that I’d have some incredibly rare skill that would just pop up one day… like yours did, I guess. They’re pretty mean to you, you know, when they think they own you, and they can order you around to do whatever they want. One of them tried to make me give her a pedicure. I haven’t got the nursing vote, that’s for sure. It’s all Vivian’s.”
“Nurses hate medical students,” Jemma said matter-of-factly. “They think we’re a big pain. It’s an old distinction. They’re already forgetting it. But I’ll just always be the bad help to them.” Jemma cast again. It really was quite pleasant, the big throw, and the whine of the reel, and searching the water to isolate the splash, and trying to sense through the line the moment when the sinker broke the water.
“Hasn’t anything come back?” she asked him.
“Not a thing. Not even a little thing. Something might seem familiar, like this. I must have fished before, but who hasn’t? I got the angel to spit out some law books for me, because I had that suspicion about being a lawyer, but it was all so horribly dull. I could barely stand to look at it. I give up, anyway. I spent too many days just trying—it just makes me feel mad. Really mad, sometimes. That’s stupid, to be mad enough to punch the wall and have no fucking clue what you’re so upset about. I think I’m not supposed to remember. Maybe that’s the whole point of me. The reason I lived. I’m the person who doesn’t remember anything. But if I’m the fresh start, then what am I so angry about?”
“You seem pretty relaxed right now,” Jemma told him.
“I’m keeping it inside,” he said. “I’m good at that.”
“You and my dad,” Jemma said. “You know, I could probably fix it, if you wanted. I mean maybe not, but probably. The not-remembering, I mean.”
“No thanks,” he said, after a pause.
“I was jealous of you. I think a lot of people were thinking it would be nice not to remember, and wished that they could have. Didn’t you hear about the nurse on seven who kept trying to get some propofol, just so she could stop thinking about everything?” She was reeling swiftly on the line, imagining the sinker tearing up through the water. She wanted it to jump and swing when it broke the surface, and maybe even crack a window. “How could they not be jealous?” she said. “Even now, when everything’s looking up. How much better and how much easier is it to just go, to just forget about everything and face forward, if you’ve already forgotten. Can you imagine… fuck!” The line stuck again, and something pulled at it, gently, then hard, then violently. Jemma didn’t think to drop the pole until it was yanked from her hands. She would have fallen if Ishmael hadn’t steadied her with a hand on her belly. Then they both leaned forward a little, trying to see what was down there. Jemma heard two splashes, one of them certainly her pole, but the other one certainly something else.
When I was about eight I learned how to make drinks for my mother and father.
It was always very much the same every time: the same kind of gin, the same glass, the same number of big ice cubes. I would stand at the sink in the upstairs kitchen, carefully measuring out gin into a shot glass. I poured twice, just to the red line, and emptied the little glass twice into a larger one. I liked the way the gin fell down over the four cubes I stacked, one by one, in the glass. I rubbed the rim of the glass with the open end of a cut lime, then took a special tool—one of my favorite objects in the house—to cut an inch-long twist out of the rind. It contracted as it fell, bouncing off the highest cube to fall into the gin and then wedge in the space between cubes number two and three. I always thought of a little green Eskimo falling to his death among icebergs.
Then I would lean down to bring my eye level with the drink, giving it a final check. Two shots, four cubes, the highest cube raised half out of the gin, a piece of lime pulp stuck here and there along the rim, a rind twist that was neither too long nor too short: all was in order. I picked it up and brought it to my mother. Let’s say it was the December before my seventh birthday, a cold day in Severna Forest in a month without snow.
Thank you, said my mother.
You’re welcome, I said, watching as she stirred it once with her pinkie. The same hand held her cigarette, and she made a circle of smoke over the glass before she raised it to her mouth to take a tiny sip. It seemed like the most elegant thing in the world.
It’s perfect, she said. Like always. Why can’t your father learn to do this?
It’s a science, I said. A scientific process.
Edward Kent would have learned. He practically knew already. Did I ever tell you about him?
I said yes. Edward Kent was the man who could have been your grandfather, the man my mother had almost married before she married my actual father. She called off the wedding just days before, on account of his bad attitude, or because he was too good-looking, or too gay, or because he beat her once with his terribly expensive shoes—the tale was told a hundred times and more, and always there was a different reason.
Did I really? I don’t think I did.
I think, I said.
Well not about how he was waiting for us when we got home from our honeymoon. He had a gun. That’s how bad his attitude was. That’s how crazy he was. He was crazy for me, and just crazy, anyway. He had a very sensitive soul, I think. It’s probably for the best that I came to my senses and called the whole thing off. But sometimes I think it would have been better than what I got. He would have been a good father. He would have been crazy for you, too, in a good way. How would you like to have had him for your father?
I guess it would be okay, I said. I could never quite understand how this other man could be my father, and I might remain myself, as I was then.
Oh, better than okay. He had a sensitive soul and he played tennis, so he had those legs. We would be living in DC and all the news people would come over for dinner, or for parties. He was Edward R. Murrow’s godson, you know, and already a producer at CBS and we were only twenty-five. He wasn’t going anywhere but up. We didn’t tell on him, waiting for us with the gun. He had climb
ed up the balcony and pried open the sliding-glass door to your father’s apartment and he was sitting on the couch having a drink and resting the gun in his lap. Did you have a good trip? he asked us, and your father said, The best ever. Then he looked at us both—a weird, sad look, and stood up, and put the gun in his pants, and walked out. How about that?
Pretty scary, I said.
If I had married him then it would have been your father on the couch. Then he would have asked me, Aren’t we suppose to be married? And I would have said to him, Buddy, if you only knew.
My stomach hurts, I said. I’m staying home from school tomorrow.
Sure, honey. We’ll have a pajama day. Did you have a nice trip? he asked, like he’d just run into us at the supermarket. Is that a gun in your pants, Edward, or are you just happy to see my husband?
If he was my father, would I still have brown eyes?
Oh no. He had the most beautiful watery blue eyes. You could just drown in them. I had a weakness for blue eyes and brown hair, and big forearms.
But would I still be me?
Of course. You’d be you, but with gorgeous blue eyes.
How? I don’t understand.
Genetics, honey. Genetics. It’s complicated. She put out her cigarette, then held out another for me to light. Oh, what a life we could have had together. You and me and Edward Kent.
What about Jemma? I asked.
Yes, her too. Those Kent genes would shape her up.
So for years and years I would look at myself and think, if only Edward Kent were my father, then I would not be who I am, then I would never had been so angry all the time, or so sad, or had to know from the cradle that I was ruined. But I realized, of course, that Edward Kent was my father. He came to my mother, along with a host of other regrets, a host of lost opportunities, a disembodied god who rained down upon her and said, I am everything you have ever done and regretted—let us make a child together. And my father had a similar visitation, and so I was conceived.
It all comes out from me—circles and circles of corruption and regret and depravity, but before it was in me it was in them—my mother and my father. And before it was in them it was in their parents. And I say—and everyone says—I will not put it in my child, and yet everybody does. I make promises, I keep lists: this and this and this I will surely never do, because I never want to uncover in my child the sort of hatred my parents uncover in me with even the most innocent and benevolent action. But as surely as the moon rises and the sun sets, depravity passes down through the ages, because there is always a gap between who we are and who we should be, and our parents, molested by regret, conceive us under the false hope that we will be better than them, and everything they do, every hug and blow, only makes certain that we never will be.
Animals presented themselves at the windows of the hospital: a giant eye appeared in one of the small round windows of radiology; three steel-blue makos paused on a journey to pace at a second floor window and watch Maggie clog with her class. Transported by her dancing, it took her a while to notice that the class had stopped moving and were staring at the sharks. She shrieked at them to pay attention and follow along, then shrieked again at the sharks for interrupting her class, and shooed them off by kicking a clog at the window. She was an expert clog-marksman, and could hurl them with enough force to strike someone unconscious, but the glass was unbreakable.
Vivian was tuning and retuning a student’s violin—the pegs on the replicated instruments were always slipping—when a bright red fish appeared at her window. Her three students jumped up from their chairs and pressed their hands and faces against the glass. The little fish just hovered there, moving its lips at them silently. Vivian walked closer to the window and put her hand out to touch the glass. Then to the delight of her students, the fish puffed up to ten times its original size. Vivian did not find it so charming as her students. She thought the fish was glaring at her, and thought it might have been offering a lesson about ambition in its puffed-up display.
Rob’s gymnastics class cried out, “Dolphins!” and pointed behind him, but he thought they were kidding. They were meeting in a new room on the sixth floor, and every time he turned around he only saw the horizon and the empty sky. But as soon as he went back to standing on his head the cry would come again. After missing them three times he just sat down in the middle of his kids and waited. “You all have got to learn to stop joshing the teacher,” Rob said finally. A wrestling match broke out spontaneously between Tir Dufresne and Jarvis, and Rob was just standing to go break it up when he saw the dolphins come leaping at the window, first one, and then a pair, then three at a time, then four, and then a procession of twos, leaping in rapid succession and inclining their eyes toward Rob and the children at the top of their arc. He plastered himself, like the kids, by pressing himself against the glass, and called out tenderly to his fellow mammals. “There must have been a hundred of them,” he told Jemma later.
Dr. Snood saw an electric ray outside of his room. Dr. Sundae felt eyes upon her as she dressed and turned around to see a bigeye tuna staring through her window. A horrific-looking sargassum fish bumped against Father Jane’s window as she was working on her latest sermon. She was so surprised, and so unsettled by the ugliness of the fish, that she fainted.
Jemma was lying in bed, overcome by a late resurgence of nausea, trying to formulate a lesson plan, when she heard the tapping at her window. She was as miserable as she’d been in weeks, more because of her class than because of her persistent vomiting. Vivian and Rob had no trouble formulating lesson plans and executing them, in holding their students’ attention and even demonstrating progress in their learning, after only two weeks of class. Two of Vivian’s students who before, under a harsh Suzuki master, had had only four months of pretend-play on cardboard violins, now were playing “Amazing Grace.” Rob’s class was doing cartwheels in a herd all around the padded playroom, in form that appeared perfect to Jemma’s jealous eye, with none of the Oompah-Loompah awkwardness of just a week before, and Jarvis had mastered the round-off and started on a back handspring—he could only dive backward into a well of foam and colored plastic balls, but any minute he would get that, too.
Jemma’s class had learned to stare at her with great intensity. She had taught them to narrow their eyes, and furrow their brows, and square their chins. They could stare patiently for five minutes at the flame of a scented candle. They could sing in unison the mysterious Om that Jemma, desperate and almost bored with her inability to teach them anything real, had them sing with her. “Become the noise,” she told them, wanting to claw at her cheeks for shame and fraud-feeling, “and let the fire come up from inside you.” Dr. Snood and the others would not release her from the imposed obligation to teach what she could do.
“There’s nothing to teach,” she told him. “It just is. There’s no how.”
“I don’t doubt a certain person thought the same about the calculus, Dr. Claflin.” Jemma hated it when people called it the calculus, and hated calculus, anyway.
“I do doubt it, Dr. Snood. If there were a formula, I’d copy it down and hand it out.”
“Did you expect it to be easy? I think that’s your problem, Dr. Claflin. I noticed it from the day you came on my service. You want things to be easy, but just because you can wave your hand at say, familial polyposis and send it packing, doesn’t mean everything will be easy.”
“I don’t want easy,” Jemma said. “I’m just tired of impossible.”
“Impossible? Jemma, Dr. Claflin, how can you stand there and complain to me of impossibility? Do you think Dr. Whipple found it easy to teach his procedure? I’m sure he wanted to say, Well, I just sort of fiddle with the pancreas, and tie some things off, and remove a lot of sausage, and it sort of happens, oh my! Easy is what you want, but it’s not what you’ll get, and as long as I have any say in it your welfare state of the soul will never pass here.” He was not in the Committee room, and so did not have his little gavel, but
he slammed his fist into his palm.
It was stupid, she knew, and like her, to find this reason to be miserable amid all the blossoming optimism in the hospital, but still she settled down in bed and languished under the nausea, wondering if she had not invited it back. Then she heard the tapping at the window. Like the rest of the windows on the fourth floor, it was always about half in and half out of the water, sometimes more and sometimes less, because the buoyancy of the hospital was only relatively constant, something Rob had proved early with a series of marks on the glass. Jemma looked at the window and saw only the blue sky and the edge of the water, but the tapping came again.
She climbed up on a chair to look better, and almost fell back, and did make a little scream, little sibling to the scream she’d voiced for Ishmael. There was a claw tapping just at the edge of the glass, and as she watched a giant white crab scuttle up to cover the whole bottom half of the window. It was fat, and without a spot of color except a blush of pink in its chittering mouthparts, which worked furiously as it regarded her with two dull, globular black eyes. It moved its backfins to steady itself when it drifted down, and tapped again at the glass.
“Hello there,” Jemma said. The very word mouthparts was usually enough to make her feel sick, even when she wasn’t pregnant, and the sight of them always made her feel unclean. She’d always hated crabs, and never partaken in any of the childhood feasts because she could never be convinced they were not just big bugs. This was the ugliest, scariest crab she’d ever seen, but she put her hand against the window, and tapped its message back to it with her finger, because the sight of another living creature lifted her spirits. It didn’t occur to her until later that it might have been sizing her up as a meal, imagining her as carrion, or that it was tapping at the glass because it was trying to get her with its claw. As soon as it drifted away she rushed out to tell someone about it, her nausea forgotten. She found a hundred other stories.
