by Chris Adrian
She had the thought that the boy had something to tell her, and to tell all of them—a fascinating and horrible story, full of something worse and more exciting than mere zombies—and she wanted to help him to tell it. But a séance had yielded the usual silence, which made sense because he wasn’t dead. And the aluminum tiara that the angel insisted was the telepathy device she had asked for only made her hear a very quiet sort of murmuring that she could easily have just been imagining. She couldn’t get close enough to put a pen in his sleeping hand, and sitting quietly with a pen in her hand yielded nothing but page after page of straight lines. Then she had the idea of using his own words. They would isolate every last one of them in a bowl, and then draw them out one after another to assemble a message, and maybe even a conversation.
“My hand hurts,” Pickie said.
“Keep working.”
“You are a cruel master.”
“Don’t call me that. Friends don’t call each other master.”
“I have no friends, except my brother, and where is he?”
“Don’t start that again. Just keep cutting, we’re almost done.” For a while the only sound was of their scissors working as she snipped in her book and Pickie snipped in his—the boy had written on both sides of every page, so to avoid getting words that were whole on one side but truncated on the other, she got a copy for each of them and painted out whole pages in them, odds in the one and evens in the other. “You know,” she said, as she snipped apart the last two words and let them fall into the bowl, “I don’t cut because I want to hurt myself. I cut because I want to feel alive.” Pickie yawned. “Hold on,” Ethel said. “The good part is coming.”
They closed their eyes and fished in the bowl with their hands, pinching the slips between their fingers and laying them out on an empty game board. It was Chutes and Ladders, one of the many old favorites in the playroom that even the preschoolers had abandoned for the more sophisticated diversions of the angel.
Still cry different silver wonder four teacher were the words.
“What do you think it means?” Ethel asked.
Pickie seemed hardly to think at all before he replied. “Still because he still misses his brother. Cry to cry for him. Different because he is unique in his grief, though the absence of a brother is the commonest grief and the most essential loneliness. Silver for his brother’s silver eyes, never to shine in the world. Wonder for the lost wonder of his iron sighs, and the miracles that died with him. Four is the perfect number—it is everywhere and has nothing to do with the message. Teacher because his brother was to teach him happiness and now it is a lesson he will never learn.”
Ethel looked at him a moment and then gave him a hug, a gesture he tolerated like always. She gathered up the words and put them back in the bowl. “Let’s try again,” she said.
A double Coolidge from Matt and Gavin it’s not so often you can have them. Matt behind and Aaron in front it was almost too much they kept saying, are you okay and I couldn’t talk because I was too close, chasing something again and almost getting it. They were interfering with the questions so I gave up on the AP class and we went back to the simpler thing, just one at a time, each of them in turn I could not make them go quick or hard enough though I called out for it and they shouted back, and shouted to each other—not like love though it was like at swim practice somebody shouting at you the water makes the voice seem far away. Go Matt go a little harder a little faster you almost have it. Every hit I moved a little further up the bed until my head was against the wall, every hit I was a little bit closer it was you I was chasing, always you no matter who it is. What a mystery how it is never you but it is always you, I reach and reach I can hardly stand it. They’re not wimpy fags like usual they were a little too fainthearted for the double but they do a good job on the easier thing I can hardly tell when one stops and the other starts, they’re so smooth.
I almost get you. You’re hand is reaching out to me and like always I miss it I just barely miss it.
Our last night so I thought it would be nice to have everybody together. I was thinking of everything we could do, things I don’t even have a name for yet. Matt and Gavin and almost everybody else, I found them and each said okay, see you later, but everyone was late and for a long time I thought it would be just me. Then Scott and Mrs. Scott arrived and then Matt and Gavin I thought it was all going to be ruined they were supposed to come in fifteen-minute intervals because I hadn’t told anybody the whole plan. I might have a friend there, too, I said, somebody cool, but I didn’t say who but it was all okay I shouldn’t have worried even though Matt and Gavin were frightened of the girl I could tell.
I named three new things: McKinley and Buchanan and Cleveland. The rooms aren’t very big, especially the singles. That was okay, too. It was like I was swimming through them, suspended in a Bush or a Bush Jr., or a Reagan and a Coolidge—I was floating I was flying I was on my way. Let this be a lesson to you, you told me, how everyone is connected by love. Look at these strangers they would not be together except for you they would all be alone if not for you you are a teacher like me. I am a teacher like you.
* * *
Dr. Chandra was touching himself, though there should not have been anything in the pages of the journal that really excited him in that way—it really was a tale of woe, after all. But it was something he did when he was upset, and the sadness of the story combined with the way it brought back memories of his own teenage adventures with men three and four times his age to make it seem like the necessary thing. Though he told himself over and over as he did it—I am not thinking of that, meaning he was not putting himself in the place of those creepy old men, the way he sometimes in his masturbating imagination put himself in the place of the creepy old men who had pounded his face or his bottom, and imagined his own face, and his own lips crying out under the weight of a fat hairy married man. Really he wasn’t thinking of anything for a while, but was only aware of the thing in him that was, stroke by stroke, coming closer to being launched out of his soul—a sadness and an unease and a frustration. Then he did see the boy, not naked or bottom up, not even the pleasant curve of his arm or the beautiful taper of hair at the back of his neck, but whole, neither clothed nor unclothed. He saw him in a way he could not properly describe, since it was a vision that seemed to include so much more than merely physical attributes. And suddenly the work he was doing—the very familiar work of temporarily ameliorating his own sad-sack situation—was not being done for him but for the boy, and with the same single-minded and vigorous force of imagination with which he might otherwise be imagining just how it might feel to be screwed by William Jennings Bryan or Conan the Barbarian or the handsome Yemeni who worked at the Falafel King down the street from his apartment, he now saw a different life for the boy, absent of desperate random screwings and ruinous teacherly vaginas, and loathing, and sadness. He imagined the boy, now not just clothed and unclothed but somehow bodied and unbodied, utterly at home in the world, and this was an ultimate pleasure. Even to consider it from the great distance pierced by his suddenly unbridled imagination was too much for Dr. Chandra. He blew with a wracking shudder and a great moan, and then lay back on his bed, totally exhausted, feeling somehow, despite appearances, that he had done something right for once.
People came to watch the boy sleep. Because he was in isolation no one was allowed to get very close to him—a sheet of glass and a plastic tent separated him from every spectator. They put him in a special room, and required everyone who took care of him to dress up in big puffy moon suits, complete with glass helmets and air hoses that snaked out of the back and looked like long pink tails. Not everyone read a belated lesson of quarantine in the abundant black ash on the boat, and though Jemma insisted the boy was somehow sick Dr. Snood pointed out that there was no spot on him and that no test they had done had revealed any illness in him. Still, most everyone agreed that it was better to err on the side of prudence until they knew exactly what t
hey were dealing with. What that was, they still really had no idea. Dr. Pudding had dusted off his equipment and rebooted his computers to scan the boy’s whole body with every available modality, but the plain films and the CT and MRI and MRA scans revealed nothing except his bone age and that everyone was fascinated by him—he drew trailing crowds every time he was wheeled out of the PICU down to radiology, and bootleg copies of his scans multiplied almost as quickly as had the copies of his diary that appeared in the hands of thirteen-year-olds almost as fast as they could be confiscated. The diary entered the popular culture of the hospital; the boy’s life became the subject of heated speculation at Karen’s bar and a few brawls at Connie’s, and what started as speculative recreations of his last days became lurid horror and pornography—Goodbye, Mrs. DiMange; A Hand in the Mist; The Lido Zombie; A Reagan in the Sun.
Jemma stood with Rob and Ishmael in radiology while the boy got a last scan, a modified PET that was supposed not just to look for activity in his brain but to indicate how he was feeling. Dr. Pudding tried to explain it, but lost Jemma when he posited the existence of happy and sad glucose, each with its own signature that blazed forth, for anyone who could see it, when it was metabolized. “It isn’t happy or sad inherently,” he said, “but the brain makes it so, in spectacularly fine gradations.”
“He looks happy,” Ishmael pointed out, while the three of them watched through the window as the boy’s legs disappeared into the scanner. “Don’t you get a happy feeling, just looking at him? It’s like looking at a baby sleeping.”
“He makes me nervous,” Rob said.
“He makes me afraid,” said Jemma.
“Or a cat, asleep on a radiator,” said Ishmael.
“Just before it bursts into flame,” said Rob.
“I think I knew him,” Ishmael said again. “I feel like I’ve seen him, before. Maybe I did come from there, after all.”
“Maybe you’re Matt,” said Rob.
“That’s not even funny,” Ishmael said. He’d drafted the resolution condemning Matt and Gavin and the bathroom men and all the others who’d molested the boy or been molested by him—they’d spent hours trying to make a decision, and finally passed the useless resolution nearly unanimously. Jemma abstained, but wouldn’t veto it because that would have been an equally useless act, and because it seemed to matter so much to Ishmael, who never before had been so spirited in a Council discussion. “He’s my brother even if he isn’t my brother,” he said confidently. “Didn’t we both come from there?” He pointed at the wall, beyond which lay the nearest windows and the water.
“Here it is!” Dr. Pudding cried from behind his bank of monitors. They went and looked at the images—multi-colored snow in the shape of a brain. “He’s sad!” he said. “Look at all that mauve depression!”
That test, and all the others, while descriptive, were never profitable—they couldn’t tell what was wrong, and though they screened his blood and urine for every toxin and toxic metabolite they could think of, Dr. Sundae developing new assays with the assistance of the angel when the science of the old world did not suffice to answer a question, no test yielded more than did the evidence of their eyes: the boy was sleeping.
Jemma was sure there was an answer to be had, it was just a matter of framing the question correctly. There was a reason he was sleeping, and she thought she might puzzle it out if she could just look at him in the right way, or look at him for long enough, or look at him in the right state of mind. She spent hours in his room—too many, Vivian told her, for a pregnant woman to spend in the room of a boy with a mystery illness, no matter that she wore a five-ply isolation suit and tempered-glass helmet, no matter that she didn’t breathe the same air as him. But she felt compelled to be close to him, and to study him with her usual and unusual senses. So she stood in his room, half sitting on a table, looking at him.
He lay in his special PICU bed—made more special in the past two weeks by three nurses who’d added accessories both decorative and functional: a set of projectors, one on either side of the rails beside his head, showed scenes of lost nature, shivering deciduous forests and blue mountains and stark desert dunes, on the ceiling above his face; a pair of shot-glass-sized speakers played the sort of music they thought he’d like; stuffed animals, bionic and plush, rode chains and motors to nuzzle his cheek or his ribs or roar over his head, set up by a nurse who had read someplace that children in comas benefited from this sort of stimulation. A judicious selection of gifts—balls and gloves and rubber dinosaurs brought by people who seemed not to understand what an ancient sort of fourteen he was—was arranged by the nurses on the tables that flanked his bed. Clear-plastic-drape walls—he could have just touched the ones at his sides if he reached his hands toward them—dropped down from the ceiling on three sides of the bed. Only his feet were covered by his sheet and blanket, white hospital finery of the new standard. Jemma ran her eyes back and forth over him, from the hidden shapes of his toes, over his strange Popeye legs, with their huge calves, knobby knees, and fat, hairy thighs, past the foley tube that ran into his diaper, up the trail of hair that came out of the diaper and petered out just past his belly button, marking a border of maturation—everywhere above it he was practically hairless, except on top of his head. She watched the quiet movement of his chest as he breathed, and the little tug between his clavicles that came every fourth or fifth breath. He cracked his pale lips to utter a wet sigh. She put out a finger toward him, meaning to touch his shoulder and send in a little fire to dry out his mouth and throat, but then did it the old fashioned way instead, picking up the Yankauer and suctioning his mouth and the back of his throat. His heart rate dipped—she felt it in her stomach and heard it in the deepening tones of the monitor—and then rose again. The tugging between his clavicles went away. He sighed again.
With the suction still in her hand she put a finger on him, right on his chin, so together they struck a thoughtful pose, and she concentrated on him more fully, imagining that she was suddenly made of cloud, drifting over him then settling over him. She was trying to touch his mind, to root around in his brain to see if anyone was home, to see if he was dreaming. It worked no better than usual. Instead of becoming more aware of him, she found herself repelled from the empty space he occupied but somehow did not take up, and for all that she was concentrating on him, she only became more aware of the people around him in the hospital. They were moving a little differently since he’d come on board, his presence a strange new mass that altered their orbits and routines in subtle ways. She imagined them pausing to consider him: Maggie staring out the window, away from her students, and seeing his body hanging in the sky; Dr. Tiller rocking in a chair in the old psych ward, halted in embroidering a headdress to wonder what his middle name might be; Ishmael stopping for a moment the push-ups he made more difficult by piling half his preschool class on his back to consider again how this boy made him feel finally not lonely anymore; Rob interrupting his own bath-time song with a gloomy feeling—overwhelmed with the certainty that this kid was really bad news; Vivian breaking away from her most obsessive study of the journal not to eat or sleep but to stare and stare into a mound of black cruise-ship ash. It must be her imagination, she knew, but the scenes looked real in her head, and she felt so sure that there was a new list to the hospital, that it no longer rode straight in the water but leaned a little because this boy was so heavy that it must acknowledge him in at least this way. Jemma took another stab at him, covering his whole face with her hand and seeking to understand him by setting him entirely on fire. It showed her everything but revealed nothing, and it made her feel threatened by him, this boy who would not become well. Just before she stopped she had a surge of worry for her baby, because she thought, for no good reason, that the boy was threatening him, too. She took away her hand and opened her eyes and sighed, turning away from the bed. Her whole class was lined up at the window, left to right, Josh to Valium, displayed in order of height. They all waved.
But it was just Jemma’s imagination that invested the looks of scorn Vivian habitually directed at Dr. Sundae with touches of longing, and when she finally asked her what was going on, she got an answer that only increased her confusion and her concern. “I don’t need it anymore,” Vivian said during Jemma’s twenty-seven-week checkup. Vivian was dipping Jemma’s urine, her back turned to her when she spoke. They were in the last exam room left in the ER.
