The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  I see you, Jemma said to the sickness, and burned at it. From her toes to the tips of her hair she filled Maggie with fire, but what was in her was already ash, and didn’t care how much she tried to burn it. Through the fire she could see Maggie getting paler and grayer. Spots appeared on her cheeks. She stopped breathing, so Jemma tried to breath for her, but it was like trying to squeeze an oiled cucumber. She kept slipping away.

  “What the fuck?” Jordan Sasscock asked, when Jemma fell back, right on the ground, knowing suddenly that she had a terribly shocked and stupid look on her face.

  “I don’t know,” Jemma said, shaking her head. Janie screamed “Oh fuck! Oh fuck! Oh fuck!” but all the others put back on their old roles and fell back on Maggie with needles and monitors and defibrillation glue. They continued the code in earnest, one of them bagging her while Dr. Sasscock got his tube ready and fastened the blade on a laryngoscope.

  “Is a Mac 5 big enough for a twenty-five-year-old?” he asked of the air.

  “She’s twenty-four,” Jemma said weakly.

  “It’s fine,” said Dr. Chandra. “You better do it. Look at how blue she’s getting. Is the oxygen on?”

  “It’s on,” said Dr. Sasscock. “You’re bagging like a fucking retard. Get her chin.”

  “What chin?” asked Dr. Tiller. “Do we have a line yet?”

  “No,” said Emma. “I know I’m in but there’s no flash. Let’s give the ativan IM.”

  “Okay,” said Dr. Sasscock. “Let’s go.” Dr. Chandra gave a few more rapid breaths and then took the bag away with an unintentional flourish. Dr. Sasscock swooped in, thrusting the laryngoscope blade between Maggie’s teeth and hauling up on it with his whole arm. Jemma could see the tip bulging in the soft tissue of her neck. “I see it,” he said.

  “She’s getting rather gray,” said Dr. Tiller.

  “Just hand me the tube before I lose it,” he said. He took the tube from Dr. Chandra and poked it into her mouth, poking and poking with it, trying to get past some obstruction. “I don’t get it,” he said. “I see the cords but it’s not going in.”

  “Holy shit,” said Janie. “Look at her!” Maggie got at once more gray and more blue, went briefly into v-fib and then went asystolic.

  “What are you doing?” asked Emma, because the skin at Maggie’s neck suddenly burst apart in a spray of black dust, and the silver tip of the laryngoscope poked through.

  “I almost have it,” Dr. Sasscock said, but then the pressure of his arm lifted the scope up free through her neck and above it, so her face and neck split like an opening door, releasing a head-sized cloud of dust that expanded to hover over her whole body. Dr. Sasscock was left looking down at his tube. He stepped away, and said something that Jemma, too distracted by the death, didn’t hear.

  Strange, Jemma thought, that someone with so much death in her life should never have seen one before. As a student she had always avoided them, managing by virtue of luck and foresight never to be present when the old train wrecks on her medicine clerkship kicked the bucket, or slipping quietly into a side room in the ER to fumble at suturing when a hopeless trauma came in. It was a shock to her new senses, to be aware of Maggie’s feeble soul struggling to raise itself above her ashen body, like it was trying to get a better view of the death, and suddenly be swept away, as if a giant hand had passed through the room to gather it up or knock it away. It was a violent transition; just watching made Jemma feel like she’d been knocked in the head with a cinderblock. She passed out—it seemed like just the thing to do—but not before becoming aware of the vomiting and lamenting and face-pulling of the PICU team, and last of all she saw Jordan Sasscock, holding the dusty, bloody tube before his face, looking at it reproachfully, like it had betrayed him.

  Hilary charges it upon the heretics as a great crime, that their misconduct had rendered it necessary to subject to the peril of human utterance, things which ought to have been reverently confined within the mind, not disguising his opinion that those who do so, do what is unlawful, speak what is ineffable, and pry into what is forbidden. Shortly after, he apologizes at great length for presuming to introduce new terms. For, after putting down the natural names of the Father, Son, and Spirit, he adds, that all further inquiry transcends the significancy of words, the discernment of sense, and the apprehension of intellect. And in another place, he congratulates the Bishops of France in not having framed any other confession, but received, without alteration, the ancient and most simple confession received by all Churches from the days of the Apostles. Not unlike this is the apology of Augustine, that the term had been wrung from him by necessity, from the poverty of human language in so high a matter: not that the reality could be thereby expressed, but that he might not pass on in silence without attempting to show how the Father, Son, and Spirit are three. How many hours and days did I waste before I realized that what was really wrong was the same way, enshrined inexpressible by the poverty of my language—unholy instead of holy, created by us instead of Him, rendered ineffable because it is absolutely ubiquitous and absolutely corrupt—and that I could be excused for raging against lies I could not articulate? I am oppressed by a mystery and must overcome it with mysterious tools.

  Dr. Chandra shuffled down the ramp, looking at his shoes. They were better shoes than he’d ever had in his life. Previously, before the end of the world, he could never get ones that fit him because his left foot was a size nine-and-a-half and his right foot was a size ten-and-a-half, and though he usually tried to buy for the bigger foot, he was a sucker for a cheap shoe, and gravitated to stores where two-hundred-dollar shoes were on sale for fifty dollars. They were outliers and misfits in the most exact sense of that word, the shoes that migrated to the huge, sad emporiums where he shopped—little tennies hardly big enough for a kewpie doll lay next to huge Frankenstein boots. He always bought the big shoes, because they were cheap and because it made him feel special, if fake, knowing that people perceived him as having big feet, and some reasonably handsome man or woman might look at him as he clomped down the street in his size thirteens and wonder, was it true what they say about men with big feet?

  They were hard to run in, but he almost never had any occasion to run in the old world, someone having said falsely of him that they had never seen him ever run even to a code, that he had only done that thing like when you are trying to be polite to the driver who is allowing you to cross in front of their car at an intersection, where you give the appearance of running though you are still moving at the velocity of a walk. And the laces would never stay tied, perhaps because the constant sliding motion of his foot within the shoe slowly worked them loose as he walked. He was always having to stop and balance on one foot to tie them, a struggle if he had a package or had been drinking, and he had a horror of touching the ground, which made it complicated to touch the laces that had been flipping and flopping against the filthy sidewalk, sometimes trailing in a smear of poop or a glistening comma of spittle. A normal person would have just bought shoes that fit, but when he looked down he got a rare good feeling, watching his big feet fly over the earth and never saw when he passed his striding reflection in a shop window, what everyone else did, a schlumfy goofball in clown shoes.

  But finally he had shoes that fit him. The angel made them special, sized exactly to each foot but shaped so that one did not appear larger than the other, and both appeared larger than they actually were. The laces were coated with a very selective adhesive resin that stuck only to itself, not to the shoes, not his fingers, and not to the filthy ground, and now every day he tied his shoes exactly once. He had the aspect of somebody who was staring depressively at his shoes, but really he was admiring them—they were only three days old and the best thing to happen to him this week.

  He looked up, finally, narrowly missing a collision with a child—it was Jeri Vega, one of the old liver kids. Months after her recovery, he was still shocked by how well she looked, and hardly recognized her out of her gaunt, yellow hairiness
. She looked up into his face as she twirled around him, gazing seriously into his eyes and giving him a sharp Shirley Temple salute. They had all had that look about them, before, not in their eyes but something around the eyes that proclaimed their chronic illness. It was the closest thing to clinical acumen he had developed in his short medical career, being able to recognize it, even in the fetal surgery and bone-marrow transplant poster-children who had lived cutely on billboards and bus-sides all over the city, part of a public relations campaign launched by the hospital shortly before the flood, meant to educate the public about the extremely wonderful things happening in their midst. Now that look was gone from all the children, but some of the adults were already starting to get it.

  Everyone has got someone but me, he thought, looking up at all the couples. He was passing the second floor, coming down the last section of the ramp—it was not that crowded for a Saturday afternoon, but since people started getting sick some were staying in their rooms or restricting themselves to particular areas, and now there was Vivian’s faction, fifty people—or maybe now it was more—who never left the ninth floor. I should have just taken the elevator, he thought, or let the angel make me something in my room. So many people walking hand in hand, and everyone in pairs except the severest, most lonely freaks—so there was Dr. Sundae going hand in hand with Dr. Topper, and there were Dr. Snood and Dr. Tiller. He almost hurried a few steps and hid behind a pillar before Dr. Tiller could see him, fearing she might try to dragoon him into her newly reestablished rounds in the PICU. She seemed to think that just because adults were getting sick the pediatric residents should all become puppies for her to kick again. Sorry, lady, he wanted to say to her. There are so many other ways for me to be miserable that don’t involve you at all. But he probably wouldn’t ever say that to her.

  What’s wrong with me? he wondered, watching the parents and the neo-parents and the rare childless couple promenading around the toy or watching kids scramble on the playground. He ran through the usual reasons in his head—you are too ugly, too sad, too gay, not gay enough, too lonely. It shows on your face and in your walk, how lonely you are. People say, there goes the lonely fellow to buy a frozen pizza and rent a pornographic video. Don’t touch him or you’ll be lonely too. It was true that the angel often made him pizza in his room, and that he watched her pornography, but only the really interesting stuff, and it was more because he was curious than because he was lonely that he watched Rock Hudson and Ronald Reagan in the musical she called Pillow Face.

  He sat down on a bench underneath the shadow of the toy, forgetting, for now, about the coffee he’d meant to fetch, wondering if he could rub his face like he wanted to without looking even more lonely and sad. Maybe I should have applied for a baby, he thought. But that was a strategy of aging fat women, to recruit a child to console their loneliness. He opened his hands and looked in them—no black spots yet—then clapped them to his face.

  Across the grass, people were setting up for a show scheduled for that night, putting the final touches on the staircase on the stage, Connie and Anika stapling real flowers to the curling banister. Dr. Sashay was stomping up and down the stairs, calling out, “Are you sure this is sturdy enough?” Josh Swift and Cindy Flemm were finishing up a piece of backdrop.

  “There’s no way this is going to dry in time,” Cindy said.

  “Sure it will,” Josh said. “It’s got this special polymer in it. I hope my horses look more like horses from far away.”

  “They’re pretty,” Cindy said. “This is exhausting. I want to take a nap. Do you want to take a nap?”

  “Do you really mean nap, or do you mean the other thing?”

  “I really mean a nap, but I could probably be talked into… oh fuck. He’s watching us.”

  Josh turned back and saw Wayne sitting alone in the audience, surrounded by empty seats. “Is he whittling?” he asked.

  “I think it’s supposed to be threatening. I’m so tired of this. I’m exhausted of it.”

  “It’s okay,” Josh said. “I’ll talk to him again later. Maybe if I let him hit me this time he’d feel a sense of closure.”

  “Maybe if we both hit him he’d leave us the fuck alone.”

  “Moron,” Wayne was saying. “Drooly fucking moron.” He was whittling, but not very threateningly, on a piece of mahogany, making a fancy My Little Pony for Cindy, because he knew two things about her that the moron didn’t: they were her favorite toys when she was five years old, and mahogany was her favorite wood.

  “I see you,” says Pickie Beecher, walking by with a ladder over his shoulder.

  “I see you too, you little freak,” says Wayne, not looking up from his whittling.

  “You all look alike to me,” he says.

  Wayne does not respond, but I say, It is because we are brothers and sister.

  “The same eyes, the same face,” he says, walking on. He puts down his ladder by the stage and heads toward the playground. “And you all smell alike. Everyone else is starting to look like you, too. Not everyone, just the sick ones. Why is that?”

  My brother is in them. The destroying angel.

  “My brother is dead, killed by angels. I have never forgiven you. I never will.” He sits down on the edge of the playground, on one of the railroad ties that mark the border of the grass circle, takes off his shoes, and rubs his toes in the grass. Jemma lies a few feet away from us, where I left her, overcome by a sudden nap—at week twenty-nine this is her newest symptom, constant exhaustion and frequent naps. Dr. Tiller and Dr. Snood walk by, Dr. Tiller seeing in her sprawled form confirmation of her laziness, but Dr. Snood says, “Poor thing.”

  Do you miss your brother? I ask. I miss my sister every day. My real sister, I mean.

  “Stab,” says Pickie Beecher, poking himself sharply in the chest. “Stab! Stab! Stab!”

  “Be quiet, child,” says Dr. Tiller, striding over, her headdress glittering in the far-falling sunlight. Pickie jumps up and stands over Jemma.

  “If you hurt her,” he says. “Or if you hurt my brother inside of her, then I will consume you. I already know the taste of your flesh.” Then he opens his mouth to me, wider and wider, so his whole face seems to have become teeth around a black hole, and if I dared to look I could see the glaring red root of his abomination hanging in his middle. He snaps shut his teeth, making a sound like two heads knocking together. It hurts my ears to hear it.

  “Don’t you threaten me,” Dr. Tiller says, handing Pickie a fat roll of demerits, and Jemma wakes.

  It was called the botch, and a person was said to be stricken with it or not. Almost everybody acknowledged that it was a curse from God, but speculation abounded on whether there was not some natural and therefore treatable mediating agent—a virus or bacterium or toxin. Nothing was growing in the microbiology cultures, and blood and tissue samples taken from the victims—there were five of them now in the PICU—showed a haphazard and inconsistent range of anomalies. Dr. Sundae retreated deeper into her lab, where she and a variety of MD/PhDs were busy trying to isolate a causative agent, while the strictly clinical types were trying to write a predictive natural history. Rob was one of the latter. Jemma spent almost all her free time with him and the victims in the PICU.

  She tried not to take as an affront all the hullabaloo over finding the virus—if there was a virus, wouldn’t she know, and wouldn’t Maggie have sprung back from death in as spritely a manner as any of the children?—and tried not to take personally the rumors that came back to her, that people were wondering if she weren’t just temporarily off her game, if she retained only the flashiness but not the substance of her gift, or if she hadn’t just let Maggie die because she hated her. “Everybody sure hated her,” said Karen, in marked display of poor taste at the memorial service held the day after she died. “Everybody hated her a lot. Sometimes I think she wanted people to hate her. That almost makes it okay, doesn’t it, if you hate somebody that kind of likes it, or at least expects it? I sure hated
her, and I was one of her good friends.”

  “I didn’t hate her,” Jemma said to Rob, both of them staring resolutely at the line of children dancing in somber black clogs in front of the square golden box that was Maggie’s coffin. They were supposed to be clogging joyfully, but some of them were clumsy with grief, and so their dance seemed hesitant and sad. “The kids liked her,” Jemma added. When the children were done dancing, and Father Jane had spoken, and they had all sung “A Clog and a Smile,” people drifted off back to their classes or their private worrying. To the accompaniment of a single flute (Dr. Tiller playing a tarantella), Maggie’s dry, black corpse, mostly ash except for a little doll-sized remainder, a bit of spine and lung and liver and bowel, that echoed her former, larger shape, was trundled off by a quartet of volunteers, to be sealed in the first basement, because nobody could bear to add another body to the ocean.

  “I didn’t hate her,” Jemma said again, sitting in her old place in the PICU, the siege of exhaustion where she used to collapse halfway through her call nights and spend five minutes forgetting all her responsibilities and doing nothing. Rob was sitting across from her, talking on the telephone to Dr. Tiller. He hung up and rubbed his eyes. It was their two-hundredth day at sea.

  “Her Helen Lane cells are dead,” he said.

  “I thought she was immortal,” Jemma said, remembering the summer she spent doing an obligatory stint of research. She’d worked with a not very glamorous fungus, but Vivian, three labs over, was raising a virus in dish after dish of Helen Lane cells, and had become quite taken with the woman whose cancer had been living on in labs around the world for decades after her death. She had liked to tell stories about her, and for three months addressed all her diary entries to her, and claimed to have strange dreams where she followed screaming down telescoping white hallways to find Helen Lane strapped in a complicated torture machine, a gleaming collection of steel and glass knives and needles that made a quiet sort of chainsaw noise as it flayed her and then sewed on her skin. Release me, Vivian! she would shout, causing Vivian to feel very conflicted about her research all the next day.