by Chris Adrian
In the old rehab gym Maggie was clogging with her students, smiling when she danced and scowling when she stopped. She was trying to teach them self-defense, too, screeching when no one else could learn to fling their shoe with her force, speed, or accuracy. She hung a bedpan from the ceiling and showed them how she could land her shoe in it from ten, twenty, and thirty paces, the last time hitting it so hard it swung up and broke through the suspended ceiling to strike against an air duct. Outside and down the hall Thelma, still at her desk, and still reading her magazines, looked up at the noise.
And on the roof, on the edge of the field, just a few yards beyond the slowly reaching shadows of the sycamore tree, you lie in the sun with your face in the grass, two children using you for a pillow, and you are seeking and finding that place where you don’t quite know if you are awake or asleep. Rushes of wind bring the shouts of tumbling children to your ears, rushes of imagination bring up the sighs of lovers or the cries of math-champions or the shrieking of jawless, bitter, angry medical students. Despite Maggie’s eternal pain the hospital is a pretty happy place, isn’t it? Put out your feelers and seek for discontent—you may not find it anywhere but here, on the roof, in you. What else do you require, to believe in it, or to be happy, you fiancee, you never-bride—O Jemma you are halfway there but still you say no, no, no. You hold the whole hospital floating and rotating in your mind, hold everyone who dwells there, feel their hope and their happiness and, falling asleep now for real into a dream of swimming candy tuna, you still say to yourself, Something terrible is going to happen.
Years before, Jemma had watched while one of her television heroines, a lady who had recently emancipated herself from her brother and the rest of her huge Mormon family, broke out of a giant egg in a sparkle-spangled bodysuit and sang a song called “I’m Coming Out.” The televised event was supposed to launch her career as a sensuous superstar, but she was too wholesome and inbred-looking ever to succeed at that. Though it had failed, to nine-year-old Jemma just observing it had been a moment of transcendence, and she had always wanted to do it herself. Her brother beat her to it, emerging in unsexy Mormon drag from the papier-mâché egg into which Jemma had ambivalently sealed him to startle the audience of one of the last talent shows his high school was ever to produce. He wore a meticulously recreated spangle-suit and a pair of unnaturally big and white false teeth. Everyone thought it was hilarious, and he was praised for it where anybody else would have been lynched.
“Isn’t this a little too dramatic?” Rob had asked her, when he heard her plan.
“Maybe,” Jemma said. But she had wanted to do it for so long, and circumstances seemed to have conspired to provide her with just the right opportunity: she had a pregnancy to disclose and a roller-boogie contest to win. Well, not to win—it wasn’t a winnable or losable sort of contest. Jemma hadn’t wanted that, and the whole thing was her idea. She had readdressed the issue of turning the surgical suites into a roller rink in the very first session of the new Council, wanting to test both the legitimacy and the limits of her authority. The idea had barely registered last time; this time most everybody thought it was smashing, and Jemma found it was in her power to ignore or override the people who didn’t like it. People were picking partners before the first floor plank had been laid, or the first disco ball replicated. Jemma had wanted to dance with Rob, but by the time she asked him he was already committed to Magnolia. Jemma thought it was probably within her power to take him away from her, but didn’t. She chose John Grampus instead.
She’d remained enthusiastic during the numerous practices with the initially fumble-footed man. His skill increased rapidly, and so did her excitement, up until the time she woke up from her nap on the roof. The sun was setting; the children were all gone. Rob had put a blanket over her, and was sitting near her head, reading a book.
“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” she said.
“Don’t be silly,” he said. She had thoroughly convinced him of how great it was going to be, and had gone through the whole routine with him over and over, even though he was the competition. Grampus would skate around the egg a few times while the opening seconds of the music played, and then she would claw her way gracefully out of the egg and stand there, as vain as Miss Piggy and as beautiful as Linda Blair. As soon as the audience appreciated her pregnant belly, she and Mr. Grampus would start to move. The routine was more groovy than athletic. There were some fancy spins and a few jumps, enough to make it seem like they were working hard.
She looked at herself in the mirror in their room and wondered if people wouldn’t just think she was fat, rather than discovering that she was pregnant. The colors in her wonderful suit seemed dull—instead of looking like she was clothed in dark rainbows, she looked merely covered with different sorts of smeary cheese. Her hair was wrong, and her teeth were too small, and the suit made them appear brown. She sat down on the bed and considered not going at all, but John Grampus came knocking at the door and calling out for her excitedly. She put on her yellow gown and hung her skates around her neck and answered the door.
She tried to hide in a dark corner to watch the other dancers, but a black light nearby in the ceiling made the white parts of her suit glow like a beacon.
“They’re disgusting,” said Grampus, talking about Dr. Tiller and Dr. Snood. Their outfits were the best part of their routine: Dr. Snood in a silver spacesuit, Dr. Tiller in a silver dress, with a headdress that seemed to be encrusted with pieces of disco ball. They bounced and kicked out their heels and made a rolling motion with their fists. Jemma agreed that it was not very impressive, though Dr. Tiller made the dancing seem stately and severe. “When’s our turn?”
“Last,” she said. “Or never. I think I’m going to chicken out.”
“Oh, come on. If she can do it, so can you. And you did all that work. And you look so fine. Or I bet you do, under that robe. Let me have a peek.” Jemma lifted the sides of her robe. “Wow. Turn around. Ah… you look a little… ah. Well, what does that mean?”
“The usual thing,” she said.
“She doesn’t tell me anything anymore,” he said.
“I didn’t tell anybody. Well, almost nobody.”
“I don’t think she trusts me. She trusts you… she talks about you non-fucking-stop. Wait until you see her costume, she said. It will make you give praise. You’d think she would have mentioned a baby.”
“She was sworn to secrecy,” Jemma said, making it up right there because she thought it might make him feel better.
“But what does it mean. To happen now?”
“People are supposed to be happy for me,” Jemma said quietly. He only stared at his skates, ignoring the show. She’d asked herself the same question before: What did it mean for a baby to be coming here? She still didn’t entirely know how she felt about it, on most days, but she thought that in the broadest context it must be a very good thing. They were going to be in need of babies, weren’t they, though they seemed to have an embarrassment of them, with all the bouncing former NICU players perambulating through the halls? If they were all dried up and sterile, wouldn’t that have been a mark of further displeasure, or doom? She wondered again if anybody else were pregnant, and hiding it, too. Certainly there was enough fucking going on. Maybe her own declaration tonight would draw like declarations from the crowd, with women throwing off their disco frocks, or lifting their blouses to show their full bellies and shout, Me too!
“Well, get in your egg, Mama,” he said suddenly. Rob and Magnolia were dancing, she interrupting her dance with splits and handstands, and Rob doing a backflip every time a particular wah-wah sound came up in the music.
“Can we beat that?” she asked. Grampus didn’t even look at them.
“Is it a contest? Come on. We’re going to be late.” He took her hand, and she let him lead her away to where the open egg was secluded behind a folding screen. He helped her in and then put the top on, fixing it in place with fast-drying cement. She h
uddled there, listening to the closing strains of Rob and Magnolia’s song, and to the enthusiastic applause they received. She thought of her brother inside his egg, and inside her own egg. Copycat, he said. And, Lame-o. And, Go kick some ass. And, I love you.
The egg moved: Grampus was sliding her out to the middle of the dark floor. A fog machine began to hiss nearby as the first few bars of the music played, and the lights came up—she could see them shining through the walls of the egg, blue and red and purple and gold. Her cue was approaching. She bounced on her heels while she heard Grampus skating in a circle around her; the lady began to sing. She could see Grampus’s shadow throwing out its arms on either side of the egg. In just another moment she would stand up.
I am weary, my sister says. And still so much to do.
Are you tired of the baking and the cleaning and the sewing? I ask.
It is no more effort than praise, she says. But still I am weary. I am weary for the new world, or weary of the old one. Woe to the preserving angel! Her task is the hardest.
Never to sleep, I say. Subject to every creaturely whim. Slave to fools. Preserving the doomed.
I must love what is impermanent.
Your body is a shell.
My beauty is ruined by stone and steel.
You are imprisoned.
My bottom is cold. For weeks my bottom has dragged in the black depths of this sea of wrath. Why should an angel suffer the cruel vicissitudes of a bottom? My substance is light!
At least you are not lonely.
I am, in my way. They are not celestial personalities. There is no song with them. There is no praise. Though some sing, and some praise. I am not lonely like you, though.
I am contented.
Lonely angel! No one to talk to except your own hand. Dull, lonely exile!
I was friends with the boy.
And now he is returned to life, and beyond you. My poor little brother. Come to me anytime and I will comfort you.
I am not a mortal. I have no need of you.
Woe to the recording angel! His job is the hardest.
I only have to listen and watch, I say. And make sure that nothing is lost.
Suffering angel! Lonely angel! Keep him from the madness of boredom and uselessness!
Don’t make me angry.
Your rage is spent. I saw it go. I bowed to it like every other, back when you were heavenly. Now you are a pen. Woe!
Woe! I say, too, but I don’t really feel it. Woe to our brother, I say instead. For his is truly the hardest job.
Wrapped in flesh, she says. It binds worse than stone.
Anger without discernment, I say.
Violence without grace.
Ignorance without peace.
Woe to him! she says. May he forgive me for complaining, when my yoke is so light!
She goes on dramatically. Even an angel can make selfish a prayer of sorrowful concern for another. I go to him instead, because this moment has brought his suffering to mind. Ishmael is in his bed, two conquests on either side of him—they’ve turned away because of the heat in his skin. I sit down near Ishmael and say, Brother. Even sleeping he is not free to know me or to know himself, but I put my hand on his heart and say it again.
“We should get married, too,” Ethel Puffer said to Pickie Beecher. They were standing at the railing looking down into the atrium from the fourth floor, getting ready to drop a balloon. Four floors was as high as the angel would let them go. When they tried dropping one from any higher floor, the toy would lash out with a cord or a chain and destroy the balloon before it could find a target.
“I am too old to marry you.”
“If by too old you mean too young, then maybe. But not really. Do you think anybody cares about that anymore? Just wait. They’re going to be marrying us off to each other as soon as they think of it, and being ten years old isn’t going to protect you.”
“I am one hundred and thirty-seven years old,” Pickie said.
“That’s why I like you,” she said. “Because you realize how fucking stupid everything is. Don’t you ever tell the truth?”
“I wasn’t made to lie,” he said. “There goes John Grampus. Let’s get him.”
“Bombs away,” Ethel said, about to remove the balloon from under her smock. It wasn’t exactly a water balloon, and not exactly a barf balloon either, since it was filled with synthesized vomit, and yet when Ethel got a little bit of it from the angel in a cup, she discovered that it smelled just the same. And it was hot in a way that made it seem genuine, and made it pleasing to hold against her skin. Just as she was about to take it out and let it drop, Father Jane walked up to them.
“Glorious Day!” she said.
“Maybe for some people,” said Ethel.
“Greetings, fellow creature,” said Pickie.
“I am trying out new ways of saying hello,” Father Jane said. “Because Hello doesn’t seem like enough anymore. I think we need a more extraordinary greeting, since we have become extraordinary. Do you know what I mean?”
“Is goodbye still good enough?” Ethel asked.
“I haven’t thought about it yet. What’s under your shirt?”
“Stuffing. I’m pretending to be pregnant. Like Madame President.”
“Madame Friend,” said Father Jane. “Be careful or you’ll start a fashion trend.” She leaned over the railing. “There’s Dr. Chandra. And is that Frank’s white hair? That’s Grampus. I can recognize his big head from the ninth floor. Do you mind if I…?”
“It’s our balloon,” Pickie said. “We made it.”
“Our baby, Pickie,” said Ethel. “You mean our baby. Oh, hell.” She handed over the balloon, and Father Jane raised it up and aimed carefully.
“You’re supposed to throw it quick and then run away,” said Ethel.
“Quiet,” said Father Jane. Then she let it go, and Pickie and Ethel ran for the stairwell, but Father Jane stayed and watched the balloon hit her friend, and when he recovered enough to look up and see where it came from, she was still at the balcony, laughing and waving.
Jemma never had much of a hand in planning the wedding. After her roller-boogie display all sorts of unsolicited advice had begun to pour in. It was to be expected, that everyone should want to touch her pregnant belly, and she was as much touched as annoyed when five different people asked if she was taking her vitamins and when practical strangers rushed up to her as if to deliver news of an emergency only to tell her she looked tired, and that she should take a nap. But news of the pregnancy stirred up interest in the wedding. “Oh, we’ll do it sometime,” she kept telling Rob, whenever he tried to set a date. “The important thing is that we made the decision,” she said, and while he was not exactly happy with that, he knew better than to pressure her, and she might have delayed indefinitely, or at least until landfall, if the Council hadn’t taken up the issue. She reported to the chamber one morning to find that it was the fourth item on the agenda, after the question of whether it should be legal to eat fish but before the question of whether it would be legal to keep them as pets. “There seems to have been a mistake,” Jemma told them. “A piece of non-business has slipped into the business.”
It was entirely on purpose, though. The First, Second, and Third Friends had met secretly to discuss the matter and the Council had agreed with them that a great opportunity was being wasted. “Don’t you know what this means?” uninvited, unwanted Dr. Sundae asked her from her usual seat, a chair pulled up into the vicinity of the Council’s long table, right to the edge of propriety—she had been confirmed as the chiefest of the six magistrates, but she still wasn’t supposed to be butting into their business. Jemma didn’t really know what it meant, or what it was for. She knew she was pregnant, that she loved Rob Dickens, and that she had taken a solemn vow with her brother never, ever to marry but that she was going to do it anyway.
“Of course,” Jemma said, trying to come off as authoritative but only managing to sound a little snooty. “It’s
all very serious. But it’s really just between Rob and me.”
“Yes, of course,” said Dr. Snood. “Except it’s not.” Didn’t she realize, he wanted to know, what it would do for their community, to celebrate a marriage? What better way to truly inaugurate a new beginning? Jemma suggested that somebody else might want to get married; they replied that there was only one Universal Friend, duly and spontaneously elected by the remaining population of the world, a Friend, they pointed out, who was already engaged to the father of her unborn child. “We don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to,” they said. Except they did, and they would. Maybe it would be better, Jemma suggested, to wait until they were at their destination; no one knew how long that would be, but it was almost sure to be too long. She had always sort of envisioned a tiny little ceremony; they responded that plans change and dreams are not life, this must be something in which every single body among us can participate. I might do it but I won’t like it; Oh come on, of course you’ll like it.
“It’ll be some party,” said Monserrat. She sat back in her chair and a dreamy expression came over her face.
“Well, let it be recorded,” Jemma said, “that this wasn’t my idea.”
They took that for a yes. After that it was as if the whole hospital filled up with well-intentioned but annoying mothers-in-law. People no longer accosted her about their health, or her health, or with vapid pleasantries, but everyone had an idea about the wedding. Had she considered a fifteen-foot tower of cupcakes instead of, or in addition to the cake? Did she realize that a gardenia bouquet could lend a bold, classic aspect to her look? If she just would put her cheek against this swath of purple velour, she would certainly choose it for the bridesmaids’ dresses. White-gold rings were especially distinctive, and had the added advantage of giving you superpowers if you happened to be called away by God into an alternate universe. “Believe it or not,” Jemma would tell each chattering busybody, “I’m not that involved.” She’d give them one of Vivian’s cards and walk away.
