The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  “What does that mean?” Jemma asked, wondering suddenly if the angel was ministering to Vivian in ways that were nearly unimaginable, and a machine started to take shape in Jemma’s mind, a thing with multiple mechanical tongues and intricate penis wheels and long textured fingers.

  “Just what it sounds like. I don’t need it.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Look out the window, Jemma. Things have changed. Doesn’t it follow that we might change, too?”

  “Did you have another bad experience?”

  “Not in the way you think.”

  “I’m thinking of you finally feeling like somebody was good for more than a day and then you get squashed. No?”

  “It’s not that. I just don’t need it. I figured it out. Not the thing, but part of the thing. I can’t explain it yet.”

  “You shouldn’t have gone to the boat.”

  “Thank God,” Vivian said. “Thank God I went to the boat. Otherwise I’d still be screwed. I’d still be wasting my time, and our time.”

  “But the list is your baby. Are you giving up?”

  “Of course not. But you can go on and on with a list and never… I can’t explain it yet. One plus protein.”

  “I don’t remember how to manage preeclampsia. I’m worried about you.”

  “It’s just one plus, probably a contaminant. Go pee again.” That was no problem—Jemma could pee all the time. She was more careful this time, proctored by a fantasy of sickness in which she spent the last months of her pregnancy on a magnesium-sulfate drip, though she should be able to fix preeclampsia and eclampsia or even super-eclampsia and eclampsia suprema, should those diseases come to exist, as easily as she could fix anything or anyone except the boy from the boat.

  “But what do you mean, you don’t need it?” Jemma asked again as she came back into the exam room. Vivian was gone. That was another strange thing Vivian was doing lately, suddenly disappearing, out of visits more and less official than this one had been, from lunch on the roof when Jemma went to fetch a ball kicked out of a nearby soccer game, or out of a Council meeting when they were briefly adjourned for dinner. When she caught up with her Vivian always said the same thing, “I needed to be alone for a minute.” Jemma dipped her own urine. This time it was protein-free.

  “Thanks for letting me speak,” Vivian said again, up on a balcony in the lobby atrium. Jemma had an excellent view of her, one floor up and directly across from her, standing with her hands folded in a freshly tended flower-box full of pansies. “The angel makes me speak like she’s made everybody else, but I’m glad that she’s done it. I used to think, look at those morons up there, babbling away about their personal obsessions, trying to apply them to everybody else in a way that will make them seem less like a freak. So now I’m the moron. Listen to me.

  “I’ve been thinking about the boat. I know you have, too. What happened to them? We’ve assumed that it wasn’t very pleasant, but who knows. Maybe they just left the boy behind when they got a better party boat, one with louder music and taller cakes and more fabulous whores and gigolos. You’re too little, they said to him. You can’t come. We’ve all heard that before, and we all remember, don’t we, how bitter and angry it made us feel. Maybe he got so angry and disappointed that he fell over in a coma.

  “But what if they’re all dead? Everybody’s dead, you might say. Big deal. Everybody’s dead but us, because they were not selected like us, because they were not supposed to be part of the new world. We are not here by accident, are we?

  “But what if I said to you, we are dead, too? What if I told you that I have been occupied with a single thought ever since I returned to this hospital? It started when I saw the hospital floating in the middle of the fucking ocean, and I can hardly describe how strange it was, to see it like that—it was stranger to see it than to live it—and then I felt it in my little missus, a terrible unease. It spread from there and by the time it got to my head I knew what it was, and now I declare it to you. A single very distinct thought, that we are more dead even than those disappeared people on the boat. There’s a different kind of death than the one we usually think about. We can imagine what they must have gone through on the boat, all the expiring groans, the convulsions and the agonies. Maybe there were devouring little worms, or bigger worms that leaped from the sea to burrow up their asses and eat them up from the inside. Those are the ones that have always scared me. It’s why I never wanted to be buried at sea, which reminds me, as long as we’re talking about this sort of thing, that if you all outlive me, that I want to be cremated. Let me make that clear right now. I’ll hold you responsible if my wishes are not carried out.” She pointed randomly into the crowd, and her finger fell on Pickie Beecher, standing next to Rob one level down to Jemma’s left. He only shrugged.

  “Maybe their skin rotted on them or their bones suddenly grew through their skin; maybe they scratched themselves to death. Regardless of how, they all ended up the same way, dead and senseless and inactive, lost in a stupor, incapable of doing anything that matters, totally lost and cut off from anything that’s new. I think we’re like that too.

  “We keep deciding that we’re going to be different, or announcing that we have become different, but we stay the same. Lots of other morons have stood up here where I am and said, It’s become obvious that we were doing something wrong, let’s figure it out and do better. I’ve said it to myself. For months I’ve been wondering what we did, what exactly that we did that was so bad that it warranted”—she waved her hands around a couple times, making it somehow a very tired gesture—“all this. A few times I was sure that I’d figured it out, but every time I figured one thing another would come along seeming even more atrocious and obvious. I want for there to be one thing, or one way to describe everything. Lately, but not finally, I’ve been thinking that it wasn’t any of the hundred million obscenities we practiced but something else entirely—merely that we were insincere. I say merely, but really it’s a big thing, to always say sorry, sorry, and never mean it. My mother did that. Sorry, sorry! I didn’t mean to beat the shit out of you with a sack of oranges. I’ll never do it again until the next time.

  “How many times are you supposed to put up with that sort of thing? How many times are you supposed to believe someone? What are we getting wrong, that I can still get up here and complain to you about this? Because we are still doing it. There is something excellent that we should be sensitive of and that we should embrace—if we ever really meant that we wanted it. Once or twice during this whole trip I think I believed it, that we were different, that we had finally meant what we said, but I say it again, look around you. Then look back across the water at that empty boat and ask yourselves how we are really different.

  “I am so sick of that shit. Aren’t you? Aren’t you sick of hearing how you’ve been corrupt from your very birth, a transgressor from the womb and always liable to the wrath of your mother? Aren’t you sick of going oh, oh, oh! Aren’t you sick of being all worried about it for five minutes and then going back to bed or back to your dog or back to your fabulous floating golden dildo—whatever it is that distracts you from all the sacred affections, the joy and love and fear and sorrow and desire and hope, and makes your hospital life your everyday life again. It’s getting to be a bit of a drag, and an old story, one that everybody should know by now. You shouldn’t need any more morons up here to remind you or to call you away from all the dumb shit.

  “But I’m up here anyway, about to call you away from all the dumb shit, because I feel like we have one last chance to turn and recognize the fine thing that’s among us before the really horrible shit comes down. We’ve been floating along like that was all we had to do—get up in the morning and eat and entertain ourselves and keep the kids from getting too bored. Like we would just float into what’s coming. That’s true, we’re on our way to something, but it’s probably not what you’re expecting—not the place where the houses are made of chocolate and your pup
py won’t ever die. The people on the boat floated into something. They weren’t saved.

  “And I’m saying it again. Come away with me, whoever wants to. Whoever thinks that they can be sincere and fucking mean it this time. Whoever will look around with me and say, Fuck this, you’re all dead, be dead—I want to live. We made a dead council and passed dead rules and played dead games with each other. We had some dead parties and did some dead fucking and some of us have paired off into dead couples and dead families and we are all dead together—a promiscuous mix in a giant grave. We have declaimed deadly against the mistakes of the old world and said that we would not repeat them, but more than half of us can’t even decide what they were and the other half probably has an opinion but doesn’t really care. Well, I quit it. I quit from the dead council and the dead games. There is something else we have to figure out—not just why it happened but what we’re going to do about it, how we’re going to make ourselves new—before it’s too late, and I’m starting on it right now. Here I go.”

  She looked down at the floor and was quiet. Jemma could tell that she’d closed her eyes, though she couldn’t see it. A whole minute passed in silence, then Karen asked, “When is she going to go?” People started to murmur, and then to talk, and then, here and there, to shout. “Go on,” Wanda Sullivan called across to Vivian. “Get going, I’ll come, too.” But Vivian just stood there, going somewhere, Jemma could tell, inside her head, not able to see where her friend was going but perceiving that she was getting smaller and smaller until she was gone entirely.

  The Council met in emergency session to replace Vivian, or rather to replace the office vacated by Monserrat when she was promoted by Vivian’s resignation to the office of Second Friend. Ishmael remained First, and Jemma remained as she was, unaffected politically but really quite depressed by the whole development, and distracted during the replacement hearings by perseverating thoughts on dead friendships.

  “Of course we’re still friends,” Vivian had told her when she went to visit her after the speech. “Why would that change?”

  “Well, that big breakup speech, for one thing. When did I suddenly become somebody you couldn’t talk to?” Vivian held up a pair of black underwear, gently shaking out the folds in the silk before she folded it up and put it in her suitcase.

  “It’s not like that. It wasn’t the sort of thing to talk about, until it was time. I just decided all of a sudden, and then the angel made me talk about it. She knew all the time, I think. She acts like a fucking airhead but she knew the boat was coming and the kid was coming and she’s keeping bad secrets even now. She knows it’s almost too late, and she gave me a kick. A little one, but I needed it.” Jemma was leaning in the door. She stood up straight, folded her arms and unfolded them, then leaned against the other side. Vivian kept folding her huge stock of underwear, slowly and deliberately.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I already talked about it,” Vivian said, and that’s all she would say, by way of explanation, or denial, when Jemma asked if it wasn’t something about her, if it wasn’t that Vivian wanted herself to be the grand pooh-bah, if she didn’t think that Jemma wasn’t taking it all seriously enough or trying hard enough. “I can try harder,” Jemma said. “You know that about me—I can always try harder. Maybe if I try harder I can get the kid to wake up. I know you have a plan—we can do it together.”

  “I already talked about it,” Vivian said, sighing deeply. Jemma heard an answer in the sigh—Yes, you are too lazy. Yes, you are not smart enough. Yes, the office is bigger than you and you are not ever going to grow into it. “You can come with me,” Vivian said.

  “Come where?” Jemma asked. With her hand she indicated the window and the endless sea.

  “Away,” Vivian said. “You know what I mean. Don’t keep going the same way as everybody else. They’re all going to get fucked, and you will too. Even you, Jemma.”

  “There’s no place to go,” Jemma said, “and I couldn’t go, anyway. I was elected. So were you.”

  “We’ll find a place to make ourselves different. You and Rob could come. You could even bring that weird kid.”

  “You were elected,” Jemma said again. Vivian shrugged.

  “I know what I have to do, even if I don’t know what I’m doing.” She smoothed her hand over her underwear and closed the top of the suitcase.

  “Don’t they have underwear, where you’re going?” Jemma asked.

  “You can come, too,” Vivian said, and picked up her suitcase. She waited patiently for Jemma to finally step out of her way, and then she walked out the door, leaving behind a whole closet full of clothes. Jemma sat down on the bed and picked up a framed picture of the ocean horizon. She read the inscription on the back: You make me remember that I once knew people who were beautiful in their bodies and their souls.

  Dr. Snood put himself far forward for the office of Third Friend. He had had the most votes of the also-rans, and he played that distinction to maximal advantage. Jemma wondered who had actually written the law governing emergency successions—she didn’t remember it ever really being discussed, except as a package of duty dispensed to some subcommittee. They all turned to it with panicked interest after Vivian made her speech. There would be a temporary appointment, drawn from the Council or the general population, and then another election.

  She watched Dr. Snood make his speech. He wasn’t so bad, she supposed, or he was bad in a way that would probably be good for the Council. The weeks and months had modified his smarm—everybody was different, weren’t they? Look at what happened to Vivian, she thought, and wondered what she would see if the fire in her eyes let them look into people’s minds, if she could see their secret hearts as easily as she could see their ordinary hearts. She tried it with Dr. Snood: from across the room she became aware of the beating of his heart, of his respirations, of the cascade of impulses flowing across and through his brain in a pattern that was certainly the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen in him. She knew he had an erection, but she didn’t know what he was thinking, or what he wanted more than anything, or if he was really in love with Dr. Tiller: all things she wondered about. Because I am smarmy, she thought, because I once was somebody, because I consider myself to be rather swell, because I have big feet and soft hands, because I know a lot about poop—for these reasons I should lead you. They were about to make a vote—Connie, Jordan Sasscock, and the withered old volunteer had also thrown their hats in the ring—when the angel announced a code in the PICU.

  Jemma was too pregnant to leap over the table, but she managed to lift her bottom over the top and do a swift scoot-and-roll, and she made good time down the hall to the unit. The fire was already in her hands when she passed through the double doors, green auras around her clenched fists. In the room next to the boy’s a body was laid out, pale and seizing, naked except for a scrap of cut pants that lay across one thigh. The room was hardly converted back to its old use. There were still paper alphabets on the wall, and the monitor—was that v-fib or just the seizures?—was framed in drooping green fur, and sported a pair of goggle-eyes on its top. “Get out of the way,” Jemma said, full of fire now, so it choked her and made her sound like she was about to cry. The seven bodies in the therapeutic cluster leaped away and revealed the patient’s face. Jemma almost faltered when she saw it was Maggie, death throes making her chinless rat-face less attractive than ever. Jemma brought her hands up and let the fire spill out as she brought them down. Maggie jumped when Jemma hit her chest, her whole body rising in a bounce before it settled again on the bed.

  She knew what was happening as soon as she touched her. Sickness was there, a deep, black mark, as plain as Maggie’s absence of chin, or her unpleasantness—but even that had changed. Hadn’t she become a nicer person, or a more joyous one, at least—somebody who was filled with the spirit of clogging in a way that smothered the petty angels of her personality? It was almost like reading her mind, the way that Jemma read the natural
history of the disease. A week before Maggie had noticed a dry spot on the skin of her neck, and tried with partial success to moisturize it away. When it faded another one popped up on her thigh. That one grew, no matter how much lotion she slathered on it. Another popped up on her bottom, but she wasn’t aware of it—she wasn’t one of those girls who was always looking at her bottom in the mirror, trying to predict the happiness of a day based on the degree of firmness and lift. She had a sore throat and a headache—these passed, but every now and then she’d have a nasty belch, like she’d just eaten something bubbling with rot. Then came the thing on her heel, another dry spot at first, but then a strange circle of scale that penetrated deeper and deeper into her foot. She scratched at it every night—it didn’t hurt at all—and dug a hole in her heel, night by night. It didn’t affect her dancing, though she thought it was a product of her dancing—she’d never clogged this much in her life, and didn’t quite know what to expect. Waking up happy was a surprise—why not get onion skin on your foot, too? Three nights of scratching dug it only a few centimeters, but she was restraining herself. When she woke that morning it was itchy, but she left it alone until after her morning class. Then she sat on her bed, lifted her foot, lay it across her leg with the heel up, and began to scratch. It was drier than ever—she dug in with her nail. It still didn’t hurt. She began to dig in earnest, feeling nauseated as she scratched into her foot, but unable to stop—suddenly it was very itchy indeed, and she wanted to know how deep she could go. All the way to the bone, that was the answer. That was firm, and hurt to touch. She looked into the hole in her foot, not quite appreciating what she had done, as the scale turned black around the edges, and then inside. She started to cry, feeling sick all of a sudden. She vomited, right in her own lap, and then her whole foot began to hurt, and the pain marched up her leg, all up her right side to the right side of her head. Then she had her first seizure. She was post-ictal for an hour, and when she was awake enough she crawled to her bathroom and pulled that little cord by the toilet.