by Chris Adrian
He wasn’t well, after all, not all right—she saw it once he was properly illuminated. He had subtle warts, and most varieties of sexually transmitted infection—syphilis and gonorrhea and chlamydia and scabies, everything but lice and granulosum venereum and the big one, for which she searched assiduously, but there was no trace of it, and she was sure she would recognize it, if it was there. She stomped on the spirochetes with giant green shoes, made fire fingers between which to pinch critters and cocci, placing them one by one into an imaginary bucket that she emptied out the window. The strange little chalmydiae went chirruping out of epithelial cells, evicted by fire and fury, jumping into the bucket like trained circus fleas. These problems were all easy to fix, but none of them, she knew, was what was making him sleep.
She looked through him, from head to toe, over and over, burning further and further in until she felt she could number not just the hairs of his head but the cells of his body. There was still something wrong. She could not put a shape or a name to it, though she burned him and burned him, and as she herself burned brighter even than when she stood in the NICU with Brenda hanging on her finger. Every child but Pickie and Jarvis ran out of the room, and of the others only Ethel kept trying to look into the conflagration to watch the shapes in the middle, to put out her own mind and help with whatever was happening. All over the hospital every living person experienced an off sense, like someone plucking at their spine, or a baby kicking inside them, or just a plainer nausea as Jemma pummeled the boy—she was listening so hard to him, and looking so hard into him that their discomfort became louder and plainer to her as the long minutes passed. There it was, almost a shadow, flickering in the edge of her mind and then disappearing entirely. She stood alone in a bright green room, the sleeping boy at her feet.
She raised her hands and cried out. She felt her baby kick in her, protesting or cheering, she couldn’t tell—even when she was burning this bright she could not look inside herself to see it. She gathered up as much of the fire as she could bear and pounded him with it, no longer trying to give a shape or a voice to what afflicted him, but trying to destroy it. Flames shot out of the room and down the hall, and all over the hospital people stumbled. Then they were gone. Jemma was in the bed, lying on the boy, her cheek pressing against his cheek. He was still asleep.
“It’s a tale of sex and woe,” said Karen. “Just like my marriage. You want me to read you some?”
“No thanks,” said Dr. Chandra. “I’ve heard enough of those.”
“You’re just being a prude. It’s not like you think. It’s not pornographic. It’s philosophic. Well, maybe not quite that either, but it’s not what you think.”
“I have no interest,” he said. “Anyway, we’re not allowed, and I always do what I’m told.”
“I’m allowed. You’re allowed. The twelve-year-olds are not allowed. Which is as it should be, though like I say, it’s not pornographic. But I can see how it could be dangerous, you know. It makes you think the wrong thoughts. I find myself thinking the wrong thoughts. Bad thoughts. Not dirty thoughts. How many times do I have to tell you that it’s not like that? You want me to read you some?”
“I just want some more coffee,” he said. She sighed, closed the book she’d been holding open in front of him all the time they’d been talking, put it down, and took his cup. He stared at it but did not open it or even touch it. He’d seen the boy in the PICU, had taken the tour there just like everybody else, and wondered like everybody else what was going on with him, that his illness could resist Jemma Claflin’s Jesus-magic. The boy had a beautiful face. It wasn’t a surprise that people like Karen were falling in love with him, or that they wanted to know every last little thing about him, or that they would form reading groups around his sex diary.
“I have no interest in that sort of thing,” he said again to Karen when she gave him his coffee.
“Which is exactly your problem,” she said. “You have no interest.”
“Have a good day,” he said, trying to make it sound like he actually wanted her to have a bad day, but he always failed at that. His compliments only ever sounded like compliments. If he sat still for it Karen would spend an hour digging out the root causes of his unhappiness. It was always offered, he knew, in a spirit of earnest helpfulness, but her argument always sounded like an insult, and stung like one, and never inspired him to improve himself. It only made him want to go to his room, to sit on his balcony thinking about how he could hardly stand to be around his only friend in the hospital, and calm himself by staring at the water.
When he got back to his room he sat in his usual place, and stared out like usual at the horizon, but no peace came to him. When he closed his eyes he could see the boy’s face on the water. “I have no interest in him,” he said again, but when he went inside to ask the angel for lunch he asked for a copy of the little book as well.
I can still see Miami and I’m already bored. A new year for me Mrs. DiMange but everything seems the same. Still the same gray color in everybody’s face and on my face and still the same tired feeling when I look up at the sky. It should lift something out of me looking up like that it used to but never does any more. In dream number five you are looking up into that sky and the blue feeling is something you have gathered in your mouth and when we kiss it passes into me and I think, it’s like this. Also we are flying, or you are flying and I am riding you—yes, we’re doing the Jackson and it’s like in number seven but in that one you are floating on the water and every time I push into you the water pushes back and you cry out like a bird.
They’re afraid to leave me home, that’s why I’m here, floating away on a boat full of old anniversary couples. It has nothing to do with my birthday, except that I’d have an excuse to throw another party, not that I would. Nobody really appreciates it, when you go out of your way like that. Better to pick one person and do a whole party’s worth of shit for them, than to spread your goodwill among a gaggle of dumb asses. In number twenty-three I have a party just for you. It’s in my house and every room is decorated in a different way, always with things you like, only for you.
We are going to San Juan and Jamaica and Aruba and St. Thomas and Martinique. Who cares?
A day of discoveries, Mrs. DiMange. I am the youngest person on board. There’s food everywhere and you can stuff yourself at the Lido buffet all night long. The Alternative Theater does not show alternative movies—next I will puzzle out in exactly what way it is alternative, no one seems to know. The bartender in the casino won’t card me. There’s no one in the piano bar during the day and I can play all I want while the sun is up.
And another discovery—I went in to pee in the casino bathroom while Muz was slaving at the slot machine and it was very fancy—white marble and real towels folded by the sink and a little man who runs in twelve times a day to change them, and soap in a dish, and French-milled pucks in the urinals. They were the good kind, there in a row with nothing to block the view of your neighbor. In number 13 you walk in while I’m there and stand with a banana poking out of your pants. I am in disguise, you say, and I am in love, and then there comes a Jackson, you against the wall with your cheek pressed against the seams between the cement blocks. I was thinking about it, because it was so fancy, and I was redoing our bathroom in my head, taking out the truckstop décor and installing the new marble—just standing there. Not waiting for one because it didn’t seem like the right place. I get a sense, you know. I thought I could tell where things happen. It’s like there’s a glow, like how you know somebody’s interested, even though they’re standing in line next to you at the supermarket with their wife and their three kids. You look at them and they’ll follow you anywhere. It’s like that, but with a place and not a person.
He just reached out. It was fine. That’s enough of an invitation, standing there in a line of high-class urinals with a great big boner. I could hardly be offended, and he wasn’t so bad. He was dressed up for dinner in a white jacket and a bla
ck bow tie. I touched that first—it was real, the kind you have to knot up yourself. Seven black buttons on a shirt as fancy as any of the toilets. Silver rims—I thought I could see myself. Then I held on to him. He was bigger than me. Jack says soaking your dick in miracle-gro will make it bigger but I did that all summer and it made no fucking difference at all.
We need a little privacy, he said, walking backward through one of the marble doors. He stood on the toilet so the little man, when he came in to change the towels, would think it was just me in there, standing and thinking. I did a Bush 1 on him and then I climbed up and he did me too. It was fine. I saw him later in the dining room with his family. He raised his knife to me like a salute and he winked. I walked right past his table to go to the bathroom again and I waited for five minutes but he didn’t come.
Everything all right in there? Muz asked, when I finally came back, putting a hand on my sensitive stomach.
Fine, I said, but nothing tasted any good, and no matter what the waiter brought it wasn’t what I wanted.
Vivian did not like what she was reading. She had read the whole thing through twice already, but kept going back to it because she thought it must contain a clue to the boy’s past, and to their future. She had read it the first time looking for answers about the boat, but it said nothing about where everyone had gone. No mass leap from the decks, no zombie war, no death by starvation. Just the desperate notes of a boy in trouble.
“I do not like what I am reading,” she said out loud. She was at her desk, hunched close over the book, as if getting her brain close to the letters was going to make it easier for her to understand their secret meaning.
“I can offer you something far more pleasant,” the angel said.
Vivian shook her head and rubbed her eyes, then looked up at the pictures of the boy she’d taped across the wall above her desk, eight views of his sleeping face. If you studied them like she had, you could see that his expression was not the same in every picture. Here there was just a little droop of the eyebrows that suggested sadness, here a hint of a smile, here his eyes seemed shut tight, not just closed in sleep. The diary was a desperate message to his teacher—so full of love and yet how it condemned her, so Mrs. DiMange was the Great Satan of the hospital. But he was a message too, as obvious and as inscrutable as his diary, thrust at them over the waters just as another had been thrust up at them. And did he speak as lovingly, and damn as thoroughly, as this little black book?
Two today.
In the morning a man in the Lido buffet. I brushed up against his belly while we were in line for breakfast, and then he brushed up against me before he sat down. We went up two more times and both times it happened—my hand drifting across him I could feel how hard it was even through the pants and even just with my knuckles. He stayed behind after his wife went away and after Muz and Puz went to the salon. I went into the bathroom it was the good kind—just one toilet and a lock on the door. Mostly he just wanted to stand there and Wilson and by the time I finally convinced him to Coolidge it wasn’t even a minute before he popped. He wouldn’t look at me afterward but he asked me my name.
Later on but before lunch in the gym. I lifted for a little while and then I went in the back. There was nobody in the sauna but one guy was sitting in the steam room he looked up at me when I came in and I could tell right away though he didn’t move until the steam came on. Then his hand came out of the cloud and settled on my chest. He said I was a big boy but I said I was just inflated from the bench press it goes away in a half hour and then I’m just another skinny puppy. Bush again and a little bit of Bush Jr. It got too hot and we had to finish in the shower.
Matt and Gavin. They’re nice names. I used to say my name was Matt, sometimes. What’s your name? They never really want to know. They’re just being polite I think I like it better when they don’t ask and I don’t ask either. Once somebody called out my real name while we were doing it and I couldn’t even finish I was so mad. I knocked his face against the floor I was hoping so bad that I would knock his teeth right up into his nose but then he made this noise it was very sad and I had to stop everything. I didn’t know why I was so mad it seemed a little extreme but later I figured it out. My name is for you. It’s for you to say. You say it in every one except number 20 and 15 and 40.
They were by the pool I sat down between them it didn’t take very long. Sometimes I am lucky but not usually this lucky there is something special about this boat. Matt smelled like coconuts Gavin smelled like gum. What do you like to do they asked me I said everything. I got to be in the middle of the Coolidge.
“It’s not breakfast material,” Frank said, when his wife paused in her reading to give him a look that invited some kind of commentary.
“What does that mean? It’s not cereal? It’s not yogurt? You can’t eat it?”
“It’s too sad, to read it in the beginning of the day. Let’s have something else. Where’s The Tattle Bear? Or how about something made up entirely?”
Connie shook her head. “That’s exactly your problem.”
“It is? What is?”
“This, exactly this. You want to avoid the problem, and bury your face in the paper. Listen, the problem is more important than The Tattle Bear, and more important than breakfast, and more important than any of that fancy pornography you’ve been watching.”
“But I haven’t been… what are you talking about?”
“And how like you,” she said, surprising him with an expression he had not seen since before the old world passed away—she wrinkled her nose and pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. To anyone else it would have looked like she was just concentrating very hard and like she smelled something very peculiar, but to Frank it announced her loathing disappointment. As suddenly as she put it on, she took the expression off, and then her face was merely ugly and sad, and she was crying.
“What?” he asked. “Good God, what is it?”
“How can you not know,” she said between little sobs, “when I’m talking about our daughter?”
“Ah,” he said, and he didn’t need for her to say, If he is doing this, then what is she doing? Or if a boy can be so sad, than can’t a girl? It was exactly the sort of ridiculous thing she would obsess over, but he didn’t say so, too sad himself at the way she was crying, and at the way this old difference had crept back into their life, and at the way they were fighting again. To see her like this again, so angry and crazy and sad, was as surprising as seeing a mountain thrust up out of the sea. And yet it had a quality, too, of fateful recognition. Of course she was still like this, and of course the earth had not utterly passed away.
“Don’t you sigh at me!” she shrieked. He didn’t answer, or even heave a more expansive sigh, but said, “I’m sorry.” He reached over the table and took the book and started to read from where she had left off.
A girl today, finally. Not a girl—a lady, older than you, even. And her husband, too, but he mostly just watched. She said his name—Scott! Scott!—at the end of our Reagan it was very traditional. The Reagan, that is. Not even a Nancy, just a Ronald, just me on top and him getting closer and closer until he was touching me but no Coolidge though I called out for it I might have said please. He called back to her, too, reaching past me to touch her I could feel him pressed up against my back and he sprayed all over me without hardly any incentive at all. Then they both held me I did a very simple Harrison until I popped and they both put their hands in it and put their hands in their mouths it was like watching Pooh eating honey.
I keep wondering what was going on between them, during. They weren’t even touching, even at the end he was just reaching for her and he ran his hands over her without touching her. I was close and I could see it, always an inch or a half inch or just a breath of space between them. It was like they had called me out of some place to put me between them but I wasn’t there, either. I can’t explain it but it was very definite this is a very strange boat every day I discover it more. I mean
I knew what it was like while it was happening but now I am grabbing at it it’s like smoke but I know I’ll think about it while I’m asleep. I kept looking back at him and looking at her and looking back at him I wanted eyes in the back of my head to see them both at the same time. They must be very much in love.
Nothing today, except you. I did three Harrison’s just by myself and it was numbers twenty-two, fourteen, nineteen, fifty-three, and seventy—seventy all alone by itself for twenty minutes between coming back on board and going to dinner I finished just in time. We are in Aruba but all these places seem the same to me, the market squares and the white beaches. Everywhere we go Puz buys a bottle of rum and Muz buys a big tube of Retin-A at the drug store now she has three. She stopped me in the middle of the square this afternoon Puz was walking ahead and she stopped in the middle of making fun of him. She put her hand on my arm and held on to her hat like it might blow away from the questions she was about to ask and said, Are you all right? Are you having a good time?
Oh yes I said. Very good very very good.
There were opportunities today a man on the beach and a lady with a dog and a note from Matt and Aaron slipped under my door but I just wanted to be alone with you now it is almost midnight and somebody is standing a little ways down the deck staring out just like me I could walk by him and touch him as I passed and then it would happen I can already see it. But let him go let them all go I just want to be here with you.
“Are you bored?” Ethel asked Pickie Beecher.
“I am always bored,” he said.
“Well, keep cutting. We’re almost done.” They were snipping words out of the diary and putting them in a glass bowl on the floor. Pickie kept dropping them from too high, and then chasing the fluttering word as it drifted about her room. She had opened a window on the same day that the boat-boy had come into the hospital. She had just finally felt like it, was all.
