by Chris Adrian
“Anika has a pneumo,” she said.
“I just looked at her film,” said Timmy. “It was fine.”
“When was it taken?”
“This morning, of course. It was fine. I went over it with Dr. Pudding.”
“Well, she’s got one now—it’s probably too small to warrant a tube but somebody should keep an eye on it. And Janie has a renal abscess and a little fluid in her pericardium and Dr. Neder is about to dissect her aorta. She should go to the unit right away. I’m going down there next. Want me to see if there’s a bed?”
“Have you examined the patients, Dr. Claflin?” asked Dr. Tiller.
“Of course,” Jemma said, which was true; she had examined them in her way, walking by every room and pausing by the door to direct her attention inside.
“And you’re quite sure about these assertions?”
“Sure as ever,” Jemma said, getting back up.
“How much fluid is a little fluid?” asked Timmy.
“About ten cc’s,” I think.
“Rounds aren’t over, Dr. Claflin,” said Dr. Tiller.
“I’m a busy lady, Dr. Tiller. If I notice anything else I’ll give you a call.” She waddled to the door, staring straight ahead.
“Don’t you want a brownie?” Ethel asked. Jemma reached behind her back, waved and hurried out, but she slowed as soon as she was in the hall. She wasn’t really a busy woman. She had nothing to do all day but her mystic snooping, and rounding took only as long as a walk through the wards. She couldn’t bear to go to the Council chamber yet, though she had a pile of papers to read and sign there. Instead she went downstairs, avoiding the ramp because she didn’t want to get caught up in a string of conversations. It was like a poll, she supposed, how every third person stopped her to say, I think you’re doing fine—this is all just craziness, but every second person scowled or turned their eyes to the floor or actually scolded her or lectured her on the fate of tyrants. The angel put her approval rating at 47 percent, not, Jemma figured, enough to save her, though the process that would decide her political future was not so grossly democratic as a recall.
Connie’s bar was open all the time now—Karen’s had closed, not just because she was dead but because no one else could make coffee like she did, and the wet black espresso grounds looked too much like what was leftover after the botch finished with a body—full of daytime lushes and shirkers, extra people who were too depressed by the new circumstances of their community to dance or stand on their heads in front of their class, but unwilling to leap back into the business of taking care of the sick. They were rare and distinctly unpopular. Among Jemma’s unfinished work in the Council was a resolution that would draft every last one of them into service again, but for now they were miserable and free, and this morning she was one of them, too.
“Hey, honey,” said Connie, as Jemma took a seat next to Dr. Chandra, the only other patron. “Shall I surprise you?” Jemma nodded, and Connie served her up a tall glass of alcohol-free Impeachment Punch, complete with a tall stick of fruit-kebab and a twirling umbrella. “Drink it all down,” she said. “It’s good luck.”
“Does that mean I’ve got your vote?”
“Honey,” Connie said, tossing her stringy hair over her shoulder and shaking her wattle in a way that Jemma knew she saved for very serious pronouncements. “You know I’ve got to hear the evidence. We all do. We’ve made our rules and now we have to lie in them.”
“You’ve got my vote,” said Dr. Chandra. “Not that it matters. Not that anything matters.”
“Darling,” said Connie. “Darling, don’t put yourself down. Of course it matters. Not very much, but it does. You just have to hang in there and try not to put yourself down to much, until you’re recovered. Then you’ll see. You’re going to stand so tall your head will scrape the skylights.”
“Whatever,” said Dr. Chandra. That was her line, the same one she spoke to all the sad souls she ministered to down here. The botch had put them in a slump like it put others into respiratory failure. They just had to be patient, and keep in their heart a willingness to let the sun shine in when it rose again, as it surely, surely would, Honey. To Jemma it was as viable and stupid as any other sort of pep talk, colder but just as effective, which was to say not at all, as the ones that Rob gave her.
“Thanks,” Jemma said to Dr. Chandra. “It does matter.” She looked at her watch: there were still five hours until her trial.
“Everyone’s going fucking crazy,” he said. “What they’re doing to you is crazy, and all the other shit is crazy, too. It’s the Program, back again to claim us all. Why would they let us out, just to start it all over again? What am I supposed to do now?”
“That’s botch-talk, Honey,” said Connie.
“Maybe,” he said. “It’s probably in my brain. Sometimes I think I can see it, when I close my eyes. It’s big and tall and hulking. It looks just like Tiller. It’s probably there… Do you see it?” He spun on his stool and grabbed Jemma’s hand. She did see it, not in his brain but tucked away in his abdominal organs, a seemingly impotent series of shadows.
“No,” she said.
“Lighten up, Botchcake,” said Connie.
“Lighten up,” she says. “Tell it to Dr. Tiller, coming for me with her red dripping claws.”
“They need everybody they can get,” Jemma said.
“Don’t give me that,” he said, tearing his hand away from her. “Any moron will do in a hopeless situation. Anybody can ask the angel for anti-arrhythmia potions. And I may be just another moron, but I’m not her moron, not yet. She can just fuck off.”
“Well,” Jemma said, taking another sip of her punch. She was about to whisper, A little fucking off might do her good, when she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Ishmael.
“Hello, handsome,” said Connie. Dr. Chandra blushed and looked into his drink.
Ishmael ignored them both. “We need to talk,” he said to Jemma.
Dr. Snood had launched his impeachment proceedings in the thirtieth week of the flood—it took another week to bring the matter to a trial presided over by Dr. Sundae. Jemma hadn’t even realized she could be impeached—the protocol was been hidden in a sub-sub-paragraph of the constitution, something she hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention to, because it was boring and because she knew that the laws had been composed with the expectation of never needing them; nobody thought they’d still be floating around when her forty-month term expired. Offenses and conditions warranting impeachment included being caught in a lie, egregious public sexual misconduct, acting against the interests of the hospital in collusion with a foreign power (should one ever be encountered), verbal or physical abuse of a child, murder, insanity, and willful harm of a patient.
He argued a combination of the last three, saying—not unpleasantly, not angrily or self-righteously, and (he assured everybody) with an absolute absence of malice—that Jemma was suffering from bouts of insanity brought on by the immense and overwhelming power of her singular gift. His speech calling for a vote to entertain impeachment was full of praise for the good Jemma, the Jemma who harrowed the hospital, whom the popular will had wisely elevated to their highest office, the Jemma who had presided so capably over all their deliberations, who had helped execute the final transformation of their home from a hospital to a community. But he damned with great fervor the menacing, insane Jemma who became intermittently drunk with power and wrought destruction on the populace. Twice she had lost control and twice someone had died.
Jemma was compelled to be silent during Dr. Snood’s first speech, and all through the subsequent trial. She sat with her arms folded, still in her place in the middle of the Council table, like she was listening to a new plan for another addition to the lobby, trying not to shake her head, or show any emotion at all. They all watched the video of the musical again. The angel’s cameras had mysteriously failed, and so the only footage was shot from high on the seventh floor, and if anything from far away it l
ooked even less like she was trying to help Dr. Sashay. Jemma looked at the screen with a blank face, but tried not to actually watch. She thought of other things: the botch and Rob and her baby and of Vivian, lying in bed on the ninth floor.
“Well, I saw the green fire,” said Dr. Chandra, a key witness because he was one of the few people seated in the front row who hadn’t fled when Jemma first descended, “and I heard that strange noise. The whistling, humming noise. It was kind of like what you hear when the television is on but the sound is turned off, only it was louder. Dr. Sashay was lying on the stage. I think she was still trying to sing, when Dr. Claflin knelt by her.”
“Near her, or on her?” asked Dr. Sundae.
“Oh, just near her, I’m sure. I heard Dr. Sashay go, oof! But I think it was just because she was hurting. Dr. Claflin put her hands on her hands, and the fire got brighter—it became a little hard to see through. It went on like that. I’m not sure how long. Dr. Sashay sort of floated up while she burned. When it stopped she fell to the ground and… broke.”
“Is that all?” asked Dr. Snood.
“Yes,” he said.
“You told us what you saw,” said Dr. Sundae. “But didn’t you hear anything else?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Dr. Pudding reported that he heard Dr. Sashay screaming in pain as Dr. Claflin touched her. Was that your perception?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Dr. Chandra, let me remind you…”
“She might have said something.”
“What did she say?”
“It was all very indistinct.”
“What did you think she said?”
“It sounded like, Stop, stop, stop it!”
“Thank you, Dr. Chandra.”
“But it might have been Mop, Mop, Moppet! That was her dog’s name, you know. People say all sorts of things when they’re sick.”
“Thank you, Dr. Chandra. That’ll be all.”
“She never understood that it was Miss Muffet who sat on her thingie. She thought it was Moppet. So she called her Little Miss Moppet, even though the dog was a boy, and it’s all wrong, anyway, to call a German shepherd the size of a Volkswagen Little Miss anything. She was a strange lady, wasn’t she? But wow, she was smart.”
“That’ll be all, Dr. Chandra,” said Dr. Sundae, and called the next witness. Jemma folded her hands on the table and made a steeple of her fingers, wishing they would just get down to business and make the vote. She realized that she was confident she’d be vindicated, and this was making her impatient with the testimonies, even the ones that were sympathetic toward her. She wanted and needed to be upstairs with Vivian. Maybe she could just say it—Look, I’ve got to go. I have this sick friend. She’s in the hospital, you see.
“It was definitely different from before,” said Zini, the aged nurse-supervisor with the pruny thighs. “Bear in mind that I witnessed what she did on the sixth floor—I know how that looked. Sure, the children gave a shout, or tried to fight it at first, but this was different. She was screaming like somebody was ripping out her arms.”
“Have you ever heard it before,” asked Monserrat, “when somebody gets their arms ripped out?”
“Maybe not,” said Zini. “But you know what I mean. It was like…” She gave a dreadful shriek, and twisted in her chair, and flailed her arms around like someone was trying to pull them out.
“Thank you,” said Dr. Sundae, making a note on the pad in front of her. Jemma imagined she must be drawing the outline of a hanged man, adding a piece of scaffolding, an arm, or a leg every time someone else gave a bit of damning testimony. Dr. Sasscock, Emma, Pickie Beecher: each person sat in the chair in the middle of the Council chamber and told what they had seen or heard or felt. “I was afraid,” said Wayne, “terribly afraid.”
Dr. Snood testified, too. Jemma wasn’t sure if that was precisely legal, but poring over the constitution had made her so tired and given her such a headache that she’d stopped looking before she knew for sure, and anyway Ishmael had already made his promise to her, so it seemed not to matter any more if Dr. Snood was or was not given the opportunity to present his slander.
“I first became worried about Dr. Claflin,” he said, “when she returned from the ship. It was a bad idea anyway, I felt, for her to risk herself on an exploratory mission any one of us could have carried out. It might have gone very badly over there, and then where would we have been? Who else has been able to reproduce her results? Who else has her special talents? It seemed so unlike her, too, to insist so forcefully on something so small, and something that flew so egregiously in the face of common sense. But it was her prerogative to go, and she exercised it.
“She seemed different to me, when she came back. Was this the same person who’d left our home, I wondered? There was something different in her eyes, and in the quality of her voice, and in the way she carried herself—these are subtle and subjective observations that have no proper place in such an inquiry as this, yet I offer them in the spirit of objectivity, and I know there are not a few others who noticed this same change that I did. I didn’t start to worry about her, though, until after she tried to wake the boy. It was then that I began to formulate my theory. May I have the lights down, please?”
The lights dimmed and a screen lowered from out of the ceiling on the far side of the Council chamber. Dr. Snood pressed a button on his laser pointer and the screen lit up. There was a complicated diagram featuring a picture of a brain Jemma presumed must be hers accompanied by a number of feedback loops and hormonal axes. She had to squint to read the smallest letters, and there were so many abbreviations she couldn’t make even superficial sense of half of it. “What is this power that Dr. Claflin has, anyway? We were all content to benefit from it without understanding it, and I fear we did her a great disservice by not seeking better to understand it, to divine its mechanism, because we never considered for a moment that it might be dangerous to her or to her baby. But all of you please consider, just briefly, the magnitude of what she accomplished, and then ask yourselves if such a thing could really be expected not to come at a price?
“And what sort of price you wonder? I wondered too, all those weeks ago, and though all sorts of horrifying thoughts presented themselves to me, I put them aside and began to gather data. Yes, data—that forgotten entity! I know its not been fashionable lately to indulge in empiricism, but that’s just what I did. Consider this diagram just for a moment—we’ll return to it shortly. It sums up the neurochemical imbalances brought on by the use of Dr. Claflin’s gift, and tells a very sad tale.”
Jemma raised her hand.
“Dr. Claflin,” said Dr Sundae. “You know I cannot recognize you yet.”
“Is this a testimony?” Jemma asked, “or Grand Rounds?”
“I am going to pretend I didn’t hear that, Dr. Claflin. Your turn is coming.” Rob was waving his hand in the audience. “Dr. Dickens, if this Council wants your testimony, we will call for it specifically.”
“As I was saying,” said Dr. Snood, “I first became worried when the landing party, if we can call it that, returned from the boat, and that is when I started gathering evidence. I kept a log of unusual behaviors including strange movements, strange or inappropriate comments, and unjustified or unprovoked use of her gift. This figure summarizes one data set: I or my agents recorded sixty-four separate instances where Dr. Claflin used her gift in the absence of any appreciable illness in any living being around her. Notice the increase in frequency.” He showed a graph, weeks versus frequency of the observed behavior, whose points made an upward-sweeping line.
“Jesus Christ,” Jemma said, “you’ve been following me?” Dr. Sundae, eyes on the graph, held up a single warning finger. Everyone else ignored her except Ishmael, who caught her eye and winked. Jemma shook her head. She wanted to pound her fists on the table, but instead she just collapsed her steeple and folded the left hand over the right. She stared ahead at the wall, but not at the gr
aph, and actually tried not to listen to what Dr. Snood was saying, though when he presented a table detailing the dates of emotional outbursts including three episodes of spontaneous crying, she stood up calmly and said, loud but not shouting, “Have you noticed, Doctor, that I am pregnant?” It was the first time she had ever put the special tone in her voice when she said Doctor, the one that turned it from a title into an insult. She felt both vindicated and ashamed. Dr. Sundae, at least, seemed sympathetic—she pretended not to hear her.
“This is all starting to drag, Dr. Snood,” she said, and he hurried through his next twenty slides, summarizing the data in a flash, until he came to the brain MRI and PET scans that were done months before, as part of the initial workup of her wonderful affliction. He zipped through Dr. Pudding’s report, outlining all the normal structures with his pointer, excitement growing in his voice until he came to a last series of cuts on the MRI and said “Look, just look at the amygdala! It was grossly hypertrophied.” He presented a corresponding section of the PET that showed increased uptake of glucose in that region. “Rage,” he said, turning away from the screen and waving his arms, cutting across the Council with his laser. “Fury, violence, destruction—these are all mediated by the amygdala. Dr. Claflin’s amygdala has become an almond of doom”—he raised his fist—“struggling vainly to suppress the dark impulses unleashed by her dreadful burden. Do I have to paint a picture for you of the horrible things that could happen if it fails completely?”
He started to do just that, and there was even another set of pictures—artist’s renderings he commissioned from a talented parent, but Dr. Sundae cut him off. “That will do, Dr. Snood,” she said. The next witnesses, Anika and Janie, were both too sick to testify. Now it was Jemma’s turn. Dr. Sundae called for her to step up into the box.
“I’m fine right here,” Jemma said. She spent a few moments just staring around the room at various faces, seeing who would meet her gaze and who would hold it. Dr. Walnut looked away. Dr. Chandra looked back but made that gesture, the quick swipe over his nose, that she knew meant he had seen something dirty or unpleasant. Rob smiled. Ishmael winked again. “No matter what,” he had told her that afternoon, “you can count on me. No matter what they say about you. No matter how horrible they make you sound, I won’t vote against you, and they can’t do a thing without all three of us going against you.” She nodded and looked beyond him. Connie smiled but shook her wattle menacingly. Dr. Sundae nodded sternly at her and raised her eyebrows. Dr. Snood stared back and shook his head pityingly. She wanted so badly for Vivian to be here to defend her—she’d do a better job by far than Jemma ever could.
