by Chris Adrian
“Well you had better get out there and look again. It’s out there somewhere, I can feel it.” Kidney struck her heart when she said this, something that her father always did when he said something he really meant. “I know it!”
“I am tired of swimming and seeking in vain,” said the dolphin.
“Well, I’m tired of being stuck in the hospital! Who’s the boss here, anyway?”
“You are,” said Light On The Water. Kidney had figured out pretty quickly that dolphins would do anything you told them to, and had spent a lot of time ordering them to do tricks before she realized she could send them on an important secret mission, one that she hadn’t even told her own brothers and sisters about. She hadn’t even told them, or anyone else, that the dolphins did more than just laugh and play when she talked to them.
“Cruel human child!” the dolphin said, but she rose up on her tail, swimming away backward and clapping her fins together in dismay before she turned and hurried away from the hospital.
“I’m not mean!” Kidney called out to her glistening back. “I just want to go home!”
Every morning Jemma crawled out of bed and put on the same thing: an extra-large pair of scrubs, a yellow gown, and her clogs. She looked not just plain compared to everyone else, but decidedly old-fashioned. How strange, people said to her, that you of all people should cling to the old mode, and certain nurses asked her, “Don’t you know that those scrubs make you look fat? Don’t you know you can tell the angel, Give me something to make my ass look smaller and, it’s all as good as done? Look at this. Do you think that my ass is really this small or this firm?” Then they would offer their asses for inspection, or even a flesh-testing slap, and Jemma always wanted to say, It’s my baby that makes me look fat. But instead she’d say that she felt very comfortable in scrubs.
At seventeen weeks she didn’t show in them, but was fairly obvious in everything else she tried. Every time she looked in the mirror she expected to see a monster, a creature with ten-gallon boobs, elephant feet, and a tiny little head, because that was how she perceived her body to be changing when she wasn’t actually looking at it. The actual change was more subtle: the moderate swelling in her belly; the foreign nipples, large and dark; and the map of blue veins spreading over her abdomen and her chest. She nearly passed out every time she stood up, and her back was starting to hurt. When she complained to Vivian she got a lecture on her posture instead of permission to drug up. “Imagine a string,” Vivian told her, and marched her around the dissolving ER space like a single-string marionette.
She wasn’t ready for everyone to know, and wasn’t ready for maternity clothes. A week before, she’d tried on a dress that Vivian had made for her—a black felt jumper with a high collar and iron buttons. “It says, I am pregnant and I am powerful,” Vivian declared at the fitting.
“It says, I am pregnant and I am Joseph Stalin,” Jemma said, and took it off, and never put it on again. She put back on her scrubs, and soon they became unique to her, as every last person in hospital, with the exception of Ethel Puffer, developed a distinctive wardrobe in consultation with the angel. Ethel stuck with her hospital gown, a baggy nightie printed with frolicking safari animals, adding only a sturdy pair of sandals. She painted her head as faithfully as before, though she stopped blackening her mouth and tongue. But everyone else put on new clothes, and some confided to each other and to Jemma that they felt as if they were putting on a new spirit, and in fact the new Council of Friends passed a bill in support of the new wardrobes, endorsing them as an outward expression of the personal and universal new beginning.
Dr. Snood put away his old gray suit and the fraying school tie he’d been wearing day after day. Before, he’d gone to the replicator only for fresh underwear, and had told Jemma (while she broadcasted what she thought were rather obvious indicators that she didn’t want to know, and why was he telling her this, and wouldn’t he just go away?) that even these were quite plain, simple linen form-fitted boxers which he’d modeled after the secret, holy underwear of the Mormon roommate he’d had in medical school. Every third day he had stuffed his suit into the replicator for cleaning, and watched it emerge minutes later, the empty legs stepping out carefully from the fog, and the empty jacket doing a careful sort of limbo to clear the top edge of the replicator window without wrinkling. He was never sure if it was his actual suit coming back to him, or something new and false, a perfect lying image. So he held his tie back, though it became frayed around the edges, and was stained with Pickie’s melanotic shit. He said he would have felt naked without it on any usual day, but then there came a morning when he looked at it, and at the old gray suit, and decided it was time for him to put these things away, and put on new clothes. Now he wore trousers with a subtle flare at the ankle, and jackets with Nehru collars, and collarless shirts all in electric pastel colors, and a pair of shining ankle-high boots. Vivian said he looked like a twenty-third-century pimp.
Others modified what previously had passed for a uniform. Dr. Tiller put away her long skirts, frowsy blouses, and long white coat for tapered skirts that still fell to her ankle but were split in the back to well above her knees, and satin pirate blouses, and sweeping silk dusters in rich dark blues and greens, and boots with pointed toes and dark jewels running subtly up the sides—they blended with the color of the leather, so you had to squint to be sure they were actually there. Of course she kept her ritual headdress, but in place of the ordinary blue, black, or gray cotton she wore chenille or cashmere or suede or even leather, and the size of the thing grew to greatly more than head size, as if there were a secret volumizing appliance underneath the fabric, or her secret, not-seen-in-thirty-years hair had been tonicked to ankle length by the angel, or she had grown another face, kinder or crueler than the original, on the back of her head. Everyone agreed that she now had the biggest head in the hospital, though there were many women and a few men who had begun to wear chapeaux in various degrees of size and fantasticness. “Gay Muslim cowboy” was how Vivian described the look, but Jemma thought that the new clothes had only made Dr. Tiller look more intensely like herself, and made her more imposing than ever.
Some people tried unexpectedly to glam up. Dr. Sundae, who previously had only worn scrubs in a shade of burgundy very unflattering to her complexion, suddenly appeared every day in a different fancy dress. They were rather severe, as dresses go, still very dark, and bearing nowhere the smallest scrap of ribbon or lace. Some were made of heavy castle-curtain material, never with prints, but never plain—they were all embossed with stern roses or fleurs-de-lis in colors only a little darker or lighter than the base. Some were sequined, though not flashily. The sequins seemed to catch and hold the light, rather than reflect it—and because the dresses were all so heavy, and so broad shouldered, they looked more than a little like suits of armor. There were square-toed flats with surprising little additions, like a crystal flower at the heel, or a detail from Titian printed on the sole. And she might wear a soft scarf or a little beret, but these little contrasts seemed to heighten rather than relieve the overall impression of severity. “Fancy-ball hair shirt,” Vivian said.
Vivian herself was unpredictable, and advanced beyond the rest of the populace. She’d been making clothes since the time when, on her initial encounter with the replicators, she’d ordered the angel, in jest, to make her a pair of hot pants with an edible crotch. When the pink pants had appeared from out of the fog, and Vivian had unfolded them and run her finger along the wide band of fruit roll-up between the legs, she had looked, just briefly, as happy as Jemma had ever seen her. People tried in vain to imitate her. She wore something starkly different every day, and sometimes the outfits changed from morning to night, or even from breakfast to dinner. A few times while Jemma was with her someone came to ask if they could borrow something they’d seen her wearing, but Vivian always said the same thing to them: “That thing? Oh, it’s already been destroyed.”
She tried hardest of anyone to
get Jemma out of her scrubs. “You have got an image to maintain,” she said, and Jemma thought she might agree, but she thought that the image of hardworking frumpiness might be just in line with the office of Universal Friend. It said you were plain and usual and approachable and ready at any time to take on a task. She still did not understand her duties or prerogatives terribly well, and knew no one else did either, but felt at least that she was coming to understand how people perceived her, and what their minimum expectations were. And her belly was an issue—she didn’t want to make any announcements until it was absolutely necessary.
She wondered, on the morning of the hundred and sixteenth day, if it was really necessary now. With the yellow gown on she was still not obvious, but now in scrubs alone she looked at least like she was hiding something under her shirt, if not necessarily pregnant. But she had decided, all of a sudden, that it was time, and pretended that she had let Rob, who had in the last two weeks lost sight of any need for secrecy, convince her. She was going to ask for special scrubs to wear at the event tonight, for a special gown that would flair as she danced and rolled, but found herself unexpectedly with a different idea.
When she was little her Aunt Mary had once made her and Calvin a present of marvelous bubble paste, a sort of glue that you could stick on the end of a metal straw and blow up into a huge floating globe. The glue had every color in it, all swirled together in a way that was hard to appreciate before inflation, but quite obvious and lovely in the bubble. When she was five years old it was the prettiest thing she’d ever seen, the bubble colored just like the rainbow in a slick of oil, floating under a blue sky and over green grass, pursued by a crowd of children. I want a bodysuit, she told the angel, and did a bad job of describing the color, sampling and rejecting swath after swath, making herself late for her appointment. She made herself later when she had to try the thing on right away. She put it on and crawled over to the mirror, then stood up, succeeding in surprising herself. The color was startling and just right—she imagined someone sticking a metal straw in her ass and blowing her up into a big, beautiful, worshipful ball. And her belly was startling. She looked more pregnant in this thing than she did when she was naked. It would do. She practiced a couple moves, took off the suit, and put back on her scrubs.
Since the election it took her forever to get anywhere in the hospital. People seemed to feel obliged to stop and talk with her, or rather to stop her and talk to her. “Shouldn’t everyone be able to talk to the Universal Friend?” Rob had asked her, when she complained to him. “How Universal a Friend would you be if only Vivian and I were allowed to talk to you?”
“It’s just a name,” she said, though she understood already that it was not just a name, almost as quickly as she understood that she could not, as her first act of power, undo all the write-ins that had put her on the ballot and won her the position. Strange that so widespread an act—the population was overwhelmingly culpable—could come as such a surprise to the perpetrators. How strange, people said, and how wonderful. Even the also-rans were somehow contented, Dr. Snood having been heard (by an eavesdropping Vivian) to say that it was only because the citizens felt they owed her something that they elected her, not because there was anything the least bit leaderly about her. “She is as great and as strange as the times,” said Dr. Sundae, who was becoming more and more reliably Jemma’s creepy cheerleader. “They know her better than me,” said Ishmael, “because she has touched them.”
“There you are!” said Sylvester’s mother, the first person to accost her that morning. Jemma had almost made it to the stairs when the poodle-haired lady spotted her. She was towing Sylvester in a red wagon. It had been his favorite activity, before Jemma fixed him, and his mother, driven on by his shrill, incomprehensible babbling, had pulled him up and down the ramp and all over the hospital, until she became a figure familiar to everyone, and more than one person remarked that she was somehow representative of their collective toil. Now Sylvester tolerated the rides for his mother’s sake, but he always looked impatient in his wagon, like he had better places to be, or more important things to do. “We’re just going down to the playroom, a quick little trip. How are you? You’re looking well. I like your hair today. Did you style it with a round brush? I always use a round brush. I have a special one that fits right on to the hair dryer, so they’re all of a piece. Is that what you used?”
“Mom, you’re making me late for math,” Sylvester said from the wagon. He was lying on his back reading a book.
“Oh, we’ve got hours,” she said. “I can count too, you know. Hey, if you came upstairs tonight I could show you my hair dryer. If you wet your hair in my sink I could style it for you. Did I tell you I almost had my license, before?”
“I remember,” Jemma said, stepping slowly toward the door to the stairs. Two weeks before she had relieved the lady of her chronic sinusitis, but failed to make her less of a spaz. “Maybe not tonight!” she said cheerily, before she dashed into the stairwell. She hurried down the first flight, paused to listen for activity below her, and then proceeded more slowly. The stairs were usually safe. The elevator never was. She could be entangled in conversation such that she might ride past her floor three times before finally getting out.
On the first floor she cracked the door and peered out before leaving the stairwell. She had not walked five steps before she ran back in again while a troop of children passed by. Led by Marcus Guzman, they were on their way to play soccer on the new field in the lobby. States’-Rights dropped a shin guard by the door. Jemma waited patiently for the child to come retrieve it before she ventured out again. She felt like a bit of a shirker, flattening herself against the wall and extending her unusual senses around corners before putting her head around to confirm that no one was there. Someone might be desperate for conversation, or need advice—though she hadn’t yet dispensed any actual advice, people often left her presence under the impression that they had received some. It had never bothered her before, to do a bad job at something, and she had always thought that people who tried too hard at a thing were a little vulgar, but now the prospect of shirking made her feel sad and somehow dirty. The feeling that she was a fraud, that she was elected by mistake, was slow to fade, but the feeling that accompanied the suspicion of fraud—a certainty that, because her election had been part of some grand prank it was okay to shirk—faded quickly.
She had to hide in an exam room five doors from the place she was supposed to meet Vivian because a pair of nurses came down the hall, one from either end, and trapped her. They met right outside the door where she was hiding, and she was sure they would come in, forcing her inside a cabinet, or under the exam table. But they lounged outside, chatting briefly, and then they were quiet, but not gone. Jemma peeked through the window to see them smooching. The empty halls and rooms of the ER had developed a reputation as the hospital’s Lovers Lane. It was an issue that the Council was supposed to discuss, what to do with the empty space, and whether it should approve, condemn, or even comment on what transpired there. Most people got a room, and cleaned up after themselves, but these two pinned each other against Jemma’s door, and knocked their hips and shoulders against the glass. She might have put them both to sleep, or afflicted each with a debilitating orgasm, one that would take hours to recover from, so they’d not notice a pack of elephants let alone Jemma passing down the hall as they lay twitching on the carpet, but she waited patiently for them to exhaust their bag of foreplay tricks and move out of the hall to get down to the more serious business. They tried to come into her room but she held the knob against them.
“You’re so fucking late,” Vivian said, when she finally arrived at the exam room they’d been using for her checkups. She was leaning against an ultrasound machine, slapping the transducer against her palm.
“Sorry,” Jemma said. “Many delays.”
“I’ve been bored to death. You can’t watch movies on this thing, you know.”
“Sorry.”
> “And we’ve got a meeting in twenty minutes.” Jemma said she knew that. “Well, I guess we’ll just have to skip to the good part, damn it.”
“My gums are bleeding,” Jemma said as she climbed up on the table. She took off her robe and her scrub top and lay back with her head pillowed on the little pile of clothing.
“That’s normal. Look out, this shit’s cold.” She squirted a dollop of ultrasound goop on Jemma’s belly. Jemma shuddered, but didn’t gasp.
“And my teeth feel loose. And I’m double-jointed all of a sudden. Is that normal, too?”
“Yes, of course. Don’t you remember anything from OB?”
“Sorry. I forgot about all the bloody-mouthed toothless contortionists I met on the ward.”
“Shut up. This is harder than it looks.” Vivian had done a four-week ultrasound rotation at the beginning of her fourth year, but was still very uncertain of her skills. “Are you excited?”
“Maybe,” Jemma said quietly.
“Liar. You’re totally excited. I’m totally excited. Shit, that’s your gallbladder. Where’s Rob?”
“It would have been too obvious, the two of us traipsing around down here. I said I’d bring him the tape.”
“Wait… that’s colon. Wait! No, that’s colon, too. When’s the last time you had to poop?” She moved the transducer around Jemma’s belly, now in wide sweeping arcs, now in tiny steps. Jemma closed her eyes and tried to look, too, imagining a mystical green eye peering through her belly to reveal a perfect baby floating asleep inside her. She saw the little quarter-baked thing, smaller even than the brave twenty-four-weekers she’d seen out in the world upstairs. It had Rob’s blue eyes and her own false red hair. She got a pretty good picture, but it was all just her imagination. She had tried and tried to see it the way she could see Vivian’s heart beating in her chest, but it was still like looking at her own nose. “Jesus, you’ve got a big colon,” Vivian said. “No… no… yes! Wait… yes! There it is!” She swung the monitor around so Jemma could see. “Open your eyes, you fucking moron. What are you afraid of? He’s fine. A beautiful baby boy.”
