The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  Or she might put on the ring and understand immediately how it was a mistake to wear it, and yet know that no matter how she pulled at it, it would never come off, and if she should chop off her finger then she would only grow another one, and liquid gold would seep out of her skin and form itself again into a perfect and perfectly awful circle. Rob would get it, too—the feeling like the stony feeling. They would lie next to each other with stones in their bellies, trying not to touch. Everyone else in the hospital would know it and feel it also: a great mistake had been committed. It would sap everyone’s enthusiasm, and efforts to remake and improve the world would dwindle—what’s the use anymore, they would all ask themselves, it’s all already been ruined by this ill-advised marriage. The child would ripen and emerge and weep for its parents and when it could talk the first thing it would ask would be, Why did you do it? Every night her brother’s ghost would come shake a chain of bones over her head and say, I fucking told you, and every morning they would wake up to a sea a little higher than the day before, not sure who this other person was in their bed, and not understanding why they hated that person so much.

  “Do you take her as husband and wife,” Father Jane and John Grampus were saying, “and will you be husband and wife to her, and love her with perfect love, and work every day and night to make and redeem the new world, and will you do all these things, in life and beyond death, forever?” Jemma had been looking at the sharp corner of Rob’s collar, but he took her chin in his hand and lifted her face until their eyes met. His expression was so earnest that she read it immediately: he was saying, Don’t go anywhere. She tried not to, but in the silence before he spoke she found herself becoming aware of the whole hospital, the hundreds of people gathered in the lobby and ringing the balconies all the way to the ninth floor, details of their party outfits flashing through her mind. Even with her eyes open she could see the little hands of children in their flower bags, rubbing petals between their thumbs and fingers, eager to cast them down as soon as Rob made his answer and the priest and prophet made them married. In half a second she rose up through all nine floors and out the roof to meet her brother. He rose from the sea, a blue-green giant made of water and seaweed and bits of the drowned old world, and raised up a fist made of white, crushing water over her and the hospital and her constituents and the man who would become her husband in a matter of seconds. Rage poured out of his mouth, wind and water and thunder, and his fist came down, knocking her back to the lobby floor and crashing through the roof, becoming as it drove down a sharp edge of water that cleaved the hospital in two and split the ground between her and Rob. Amid the screaming and moaning and the wash of bloody foam, among the swirling children and parts of children Jemma could still see Rob. He was just a pair of disembodied, earnest blue eyes, but they fixed her in place, and seemed to glow, and the light they shed picked out the pieces of his body hidden by her fantasy of doom, until the waters were driven back. He smiled a little, and nodded, and spoke his answer.

  Jemma wondered if she was the only sober person at the reception. Unprecedented amounts of booze had been replicated for the party, some never before tasted on the earth, and the Council, which put forth an official line that alcohol should not be replicated within the hospital except at Connie’s new bar in the old emergency room, where she could, at her discretion, require you to undergo immediate detox with a shot of a blue liquid that looked and tasted just like the solution barbers had used to sterilize their combs and scissors. But the prohibition, which had been stated anyway in the mildest language, and was always largely ignored, was relaxed even further for the party. People hovered around the ice sculpture, four leaping dolphins who poured champagne out of their mouths, dipping and re-dipping, or received drinks from whichever temporary bartender happened to be behind a table. There were no servants, except, as the Council had declared, that they each were the servant of the other. So you received your whiskey skidoo or your green envy or your Rob ’n’ Jemma from someone dressed up as fancy as you, and maybe even from Rob or from Jemma, who, though it was (and yet was expressly not) their day, were not excused from the fifteen-minute rounds of duty.

  People talked about the wedding, and called it a wedding, or the wedding to end all weddings, but it was not supposed to be a wedding, and that was the one thing people were not supposed to call it. At first it was supposed to be a wedding, a very wonderful one, and then it was supposed to be a wedding and something more, but as the Council examined the old order, and reflected on the institutions of the old world, it was decided that a modification was in order. It would be something new, something never before seen on the earth, a ceremony that would as much officially and visibly mark the whole community’s commitment to making a new beginning as it would bind two lovers together for life. This was all fine with Jemma: to be married without having a wedding seemed better in line with her previous commitments and obsessions. She signed off on all sorts of innovations, and added a few of her own. For instance, it was Jemma who declared that no one would be with the bride or with the groom. “Away with that tired old distinction,” she said, and let everybody be simply of the wedding. Except they could not be of the wedding, because this was not a wedding. The official name for it was “the ceremony,” but many people, neo-traditionalists, simply called it, like the other major events that had befallen them, a Thing, and when someone used that word you had to figure out by context if they meant Thing One, Thing Two, Thing Three, or just some ordinary thing.

  As the wedding was more and better than a wedding, so the reception was more and better than an ordinary party. But we can call it a reception, Jemma had asked, in a meeting.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Snood. “Why wouldn’t we?”

  “If the wedding is not a wedding, then doesn’t it follow that the reception is not a reception?”

  “But it is. It’s still a party following a big event. It’s the event that is different, not the party, or the idea of the party. But the idea of the event is quite different.”

  “So it’s just a party,” Jemma said.

  “Oh, it’s more than just a party.”

  “But it’s still a reception? And we will all call it a reception and be satisfied with that?”

  “Correct.” All this was clarified in subsection sixteen of section four of paragraph twelve of a document called On the New Ceremony. It was a thick piece of work, detailing the number of hors d’oeuvre that could be on any given serving plate, the gallons of champagne that would spew per hour from the mouths of the dolphins, the depth of the mousse trough, and the temperatures of the various roasts. It told how many and what sort of fireworks would be let off, and contained twenty pages of seating charts alone. It did not specify levels of required or permitted drunkenness for the guests and celebrants, but Jemma imagined that it did, as she walked about on the roof nodding at people and shaking their hands and engaging in brief drunken conversation with them. She and her brother had tried to come up with a better system of classification, one, two, and three sheets to the wind not being sufficiently subtle to describe the states and degrees of intoxication that their parents regularly achieved. They settled on a blotto scale, one through ten, though Calvin had a change of heart, insisting that there must exist gradations far beyond what they could measure, and he called to expand the scale from pico-blotto at the small end to mega-blotto on the big. They postulated the existence of a mean, a person, they called him Cousin Otto, who was kept in a vault in Stockholm in a carefully controlled steady state of drunkenness, exactly five point zero zero zero zero blotto, against whose perfect drunk all the drunkenness in the world was measured. Every morning a team of scientists would test his coordination and speech and ability to maintain an erection and calibrate him with nips of booze as pure as science could produce.

  There were mostly fives and ones about that night. Jemma made her rounds, at first arm in arm with Rob, and then by herself after he got swept away to dance or do flips, and did her time carrying a t
ray of bacon-wrapped asparagus and serving drinks at the bar, and noticed that most people approximated Cousin Otto, very friendly and somewhat stumbly, slurring only when excitement drove them to speak too fast. Most of the children managed a one without drinking anything at all. The twelve-and-unders were all flushed and sweaty and had their weak little inhibitions undone by the festive atmosphere. Among the older kids there were a few zeroes, some fives, and a number of sevens. Cindy Flemm, an eight, leaned heavily on her Wayne, looking like a five a.m. prom queen, insulting people, apologizing immediately, and inaugurating new friendships with them. Rob was a three or a four; Vivian was a six. There were only two tens, Drs. Sundae and Snood, and only one who fell off the scale. That was Ishmael, who for the last half of the party sat at a table and ranted at anyone who would come within ten feet of him.

  “We can dig down deep,” he was saying as Jemma sat down at his table with a virgin Rob ’n’ Jemma in one hand and a plate of miniature quiches—no two were alike—in the other. “Deep under the drowned earth, or deep into Hell, or we could climb up above the clouds, or inside a mountain, or even just sit down underneath all the water in a sea of kelp, or you could hide in the trunk of a Volkswagen in the middle of a thick jungle of kelp. He would still send His snake to bite you on the ass.”

  “What is he talking about?” Jemma whispered to Jordan Sasscock.

  “I have no idea,” he whispered back. “A little while ago he was talking about a movie he was going to have made, and then he started to get mad about something.”

  “Ah,” he said, squinting at her. “It’s the Bird! Bird of Frankenstein! Bird of Moron! Tell, me, little bridle, do you think you are safe here?”

  “Well…” Jemma said.

  “Shush! Did you think I actually wanted to hear you talking? No, I was just being polite. But enough of that. There’s no time left for that. You are not safe. I am not safe. Nobody is safe from destruction. And sudden, for that matter. And unexpected. Sudden, unexpected destruction. It could happen like that.” He tried to snap his fingers but his fingers were greasy from the buttery quiches, and the fingers only slid off one another without making any noise. He tried it again, flailing his arm and knocking over his drink. “As easy as that, anyway,” he said, looking around the table. There was an abandoned drink at the seat to his left, which he raked toward himself. “It’s easy for Him to do it, to yank the carpet or draw back the plank. It’s not just that He can do it, but that He can do it so easily.”

  “Ishmael,” Jemma asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “If you don’t know,” he said. “Then it’s too late to ask. I’m tired of you, anyway. Aren’t you tired of her?” He looked around at the other people at the table, Dr. Tiller and Dr. Sasscock and Dr. Sundae and Frank and Connie, and asked it again. “Aren’t you all tired of her? Bridey this and bridey that and let’s make a wedding dress and oh are you going to enter the contest to design a pillow for their mint?”

  “Do you want to take a nap?” Jemma asked him. The music paused, and the first of the fireworks went off. Ishmael cringed away from them, but everyone else at the table turned to the sky to see the bursting fire flowers, not just peonies but roses and lilies and tulips and orchids on long curving stems. A rocket trailed bright green fire that hung for a whole minute in the sky, arcing up and then starting down, finally bursting into white flares that seemed to fold themselves out, revealing insides that were pink and orange and red.

  “It’s what everyone is doing, isn’t it? Napping, sleeping, dreaming, dancing, feasting, drinking. Of all these drinking is the best. It says yes to the truth, and lets you understand how angry He is. I think He is angrier with the people out on that dance floor than He is with the bones under the water. You are all still boundlessly, furiously corrupt.”

  “And what are you?” asked Dr. Tiller, seated across from Jemma. “Pure chopped liver? White tuna in virgin olive oil?”

  “I am… very drunk,” he said, and laughed. He reached out, very swift and very sure for someone so drunk, and plucked Dr. Tiller’s Rob ’n’ Jemma from her hand, then drank it all down in one gulp. Jemma sipped at hers. It tasted kind of like shampoo, and she wondered of she weren’t missing the best part of the experience, without the alcohol. It was the most popular drink at the party, and the most stupefying, designed by Connie and the angel so that just one of them was enough to knock you on your ass. “I am… sad and angry. Why is my spirit so sad and angry? I look back at my life and all I can remember is rage and rage and rage. What are you, anyway, Ms. Fancy-Ass Do-Rag Sourpuss?”

  “I am Dr. Carmen Octavia Tiller,” she said, tilting her head back and looking him right in the eye. “How many lives have you saved?” Ishmael laughed again.

  “Creature! You think you will escape the water, just because you’re dry now? The bottom could drop out of this place at any moment, and then nothing would keep you from being dragged down by your own corruption. You say, I have taken pains, I have made amends, I am being careful, but you haven’t, and you haven’t, and you aren’t.”

  “Hear hear,” said Dr. Sundae, staring up at the empty sky, waiting for the rest of the show.

  “Now you’re putting words in my mouth,” said Dr. Tiller.

  “I had better do it, since all you put in your own is shit and worse than shit.” He knocked his head once against the table, making all the plates and glasses jump.

  “Hey,” Jemma said. “Take it easy.”

  “There is no more ease, and has been no more since the rain came, and yet everyone cries, Ease and pleasure and good work and celebration. But no matter what you do all that keeps you from the water is the uncovenanted, unobliged hospital of an incensed God.” He stood and leaned over the table and nabbed Jemma’s drink, but had hardly taken it all into his mouth before he spit it out again. “That’s useless,” he said, pushing himself upright off the table, wobbling in place while he looked around for the nearest bar table. Another flight of rockets went up, animals this time, a parade of leaping fish and dolphins, a serene blue whale that hung hugely in the sky for a moment and then gave a languid swish of its tail and dissolved from its head down, so it appeared to be swimming off into a different, hidden sky. There were jellyfish with rocket-streamer tentacles and bright, magnesium-flare bodies, and a host of land animals that galloped or trotted or slithered across the stars. Ishmael came back with a drink in either hand, one of them already empty, just as the finale exploded above them. “You shat all over the old covenant,” he shouted, “and there will be no more covenants, and the new uncovenant will not be with you!” No one but Jemma was listening, though. They were all looking up at the four rockets that burst in turn into blue sea, green land, silver mountain, and white cloud, the whole picture seeming to take up the whole quarter of sky toward which the animals had all been swimming or running or slithering. The music started again. Ishmael took off his shirt and stumbled out toward the dance floor, where he knocked Josh aside with a blow from his hip and swayed and stomped with Cindy Flemm, both of them doing an awkward-looking honky jive that mostly involved pointing around in various directions. A herd of pre-teens, hopping alternately from foot to foot, broke and ran when they came near.

  Jemma never told him “I think you’ve had enough,” though it was obvious that he had already achieved the drunk of a lifetime, and she never warned him to look out for the cake, though she was sure he would fall into it at some point, because there was something about drunks and cakes and punch bowls and Christmas trees, an attraction as certain and powerful as gravity that dictated they must meet once a certain level of drunkenness was established. Many nights she had watched as her mother approached the ten blotto threshold and was drawn inevitably to sway and lean toward her shelves of precious porcelain figurines, the ones she’d been collecting for decades. And when she finally did fall into them one night when Jemma was sixteen it was as satisfying as a celestial event. By the time Ishmael fell into the cake he had taken off all his clothes ex
cept for one stubbornly clinging shoe and sock. Jemma was still sitting, leaning forward with both elbows on the table. She had a good view of him and the small crowd of assistants he’d drawn to himself, people trying to get him dressed again or take away his drinks. He was too big for anyone to make him do something he didn’t want to do. The shoe only thwarted him because he had triple knotted it at some point.

  The cake was as tall as he was. Nine tiers, it looked a little like the hospital itself, and was decorated with a fine marzipan lace and hundreds of little figurines. It was a not-wedding cake for a not-wedding. Instead of Rob and Jemma standing on the top, everyone in the hospital had a little representative planted in the frosting. Ishmael had gone after the cake knife, to cut his shoelaces, and had scared away his assistants when he brandished it. There was no one nearby to catch him when he fell after finally extricating himself from the shoe. It went flying forward as he went falling back, passing within feet of Jemma’s head. “How can you rest for one moment in this condition?” he was shouting, before he tipped. Being in the cake seemed to calm him. He just lay there while the music stopped again and word of the disaster spread across the roof and down the ramp into the hospital. People stopped dancing and talking and drinking and eating; children stopped chasing each other or throwing food, and ring after ring gathered around the former cake to look at him. Jemma got up and went to it, too. The crowd parted for her, people thinking that she must be terribly upset to see her cake destroyed, but she didn’t much care about the cake. It could be replaced in an instant.