The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  “Are you ready?” Father Jane asked, addressing her congregation from bed. They were in the auditorium, her bed stuck up at the front of the room, John Grampus standing at her side. To all eyes but Jemma’s he seemed to have made a miraculous recovery—he was out of bed, off the respirator, on po digoxin and could be seen for a while running every day up and down the ramp on his bionic leg—heroically attached by Drs. Tiller, Sundae, and Snood with the help of Dr. Walnut’s notes and some automated surgical devices—until it became clear that the same people who had first celebrated his return to health as a sign of universal hope, were beginning to resent him, his swift little jog and his too-short baby-blue running shorts. For everyone else, to look at him was to see no trace of illness, but Jemma could see the botch in him, dormant cysts in his muscles. “Are you ready?” Father Jane asked again, pausing to look out over the little crowd with her blind eyes—a thick layer of black cataract kept her from seeing anything but blurry shapes. She pointed but didn’t call out names.

  “I have been asking myself that question every day now, for the past few weeks. I used to ask it in an entirely different context. Jane, are you ready for the new world? Are you ready to start again? Are you ready to leave this very comfortable place, to take up burdens that will be heavy in ways that you can’t even imagine? Are you ready to be worthy of that place. Are you ready for your second chance?

  “You know, I never was really sure. You will be angry with me when I tell you that I always wanted one more day, another chance to talk to the angel, another opportunity to gather up my courage and make sure that I could handle it. It’s almost a relief, to know that I’m not going to see it, now. Almost, but not quite, because I really did think I was finally ready. It was all in me, everything I needed to step out and be worthy of the new grass and the new trees and the new mountains and the deep new sky. I thought I could see everything, the shape of the leaves, the colors of the new, wonderful birds—colors not ever even seen before. It was probably stupid, to think I could contain it in my mind, to know it at all before it was here, and maybe this vanity is just barred me from it. It’s easy to think that. It’s always easier, to think the worst thing. Jane, you’re fat. Jane, you’re a whore. Jane, you’re disgusting. Jane, you’re too ugly, inside and out, for anyone to love you. You hardly even have to try, to think like that. Jane, a whale has a better chance of swimming up your ass than do you of entering the new world.

  “Lately I’ve been asking myself another question. Are you ready? It sounds the same, but actually is different. Are you ready to leave this horrible place? Are you ready to be freed from the chamber? Are you ready to go away from here? It should be an easy answer, I know. But I am held by other questions. I worry for our errand, whether we ever properly defined it, let alone completed it. All these sleeping children—I know what they are dreaming about—I envy them and sometimes I am angry at them and sometimes I even feel a hatred toward them. I hope it is just the sickness in me that makes me want to bite the baby or kick the toddler—when I am thinking Why not me, these feelings are the answer. Weren’t we supposed to do something with them and with ourselves? We kept saying that we would. Remember what Vivian said? We were all saying it, in our own way. We kept sounding like we meant it. I worry that we all just sat around, after a while, trying to enjoy a ride that was never meant to be fun, that when the obvious was presented to us we stared and stared at it, and pretended it was not there, and that when we thought we were improving ourselves and making a model of what was to come we were only playing a stupid game.

  “Again, it’s so easy to think like this. Somehow this bed makes it easier. I asked the angel for a bed that would help me think, that would push my mind out of its usual ruts, and yes there are these special buttons, and the clasping mittens that give you that wonderful massage, but lying in bed was ever an activity for the morose, the languid, the lazy depressives. I got a glimpse, the other day, not in a dream, not in vision. I wasn’t even looking out the window. You know I lost the feeling in my toes about five days ago. Now they don’t hurt like they did, but I have to check, every so often, to make sure they’re still there. You remember Dr. Walnut, no doubt, and how his toes rotted to little stubs, how they were black and hard on the outside, red and tender in the middle. I have a fear of that. I lifted up the sheet to look and my toes were there but so was this other thing.

  “I had a feeling—my toes were there and I was so grateful to still have them, and out of that I had this feeling that everything was right, that everything had gone just as it should have. How about that? I am a pretty sensitive girl, and I have a good memory. I took another look at things, and yes I felt the sadnesss and the rage, the cold grief, but then it was sort of… farther away, and this other feeling was still there. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about rotting toes or broken promises or orphaned sleepers, or about the lost world, and all those people under the water, but I could think about them and still I had this feeling like everything was all right. Maybe it is just a vessel in my brain, all blocked up and causing trouble, or spreading lies in my head. I don’t think so.

  “So here I am, lying down here in front of you. Look, my toes are still here.” She wiggled them under the sheet. “I can’t feel them but I can move them! Look, I am ready. I am all right, all fine, all… done. How about you? That is the lesson for today, the little bit that I can tell you about this afternoon, before you go back to your patients or your own illness. And before you go I want you to try it for me. I want to try to make you feel it, because I am sure that it is the very next step. Are you ready? John and Elizabeth and Rob and Connie, I know you’re out there. Close your eyes with me and pray.”

  Jemma closed her eyes, too, along with the fifty people crowded into the room. She saw differently with them closed, but it was just as plain: the botch in every body. She thought she could feel it, the strain in the minds as they tried to feel what Father Jane was feeling. Here and there someone let out a little peep of a groan. It was so quiet, but only Jemma marked it when Father Jane stopped breathing, and for many minutes no one but Jemma knew she was dead.

  “Do you think she’ll come?” Jemma asked Calvin.

  “She always comes,” he said. They were waiting for their ride to school, a woman named Deb who drove a yellow taxi. Their mother had hired her months before, to solve the problem of driving them to school in the winter, after a failed experiment with a carpool—she’d entered them in it enthusiastically, but pulled them out quickly when she realized she was expected to drive other people’s children into town. Now it was September, in the middle of a late heat wave, and there was no snow anywhere, but their mother liked the arrangement too much to have canceled it on account of good weather, especially during times like now when she had retreated into her darkened room to sleep and sleep. Jemma, not very far penetrated into the third grade, was eager to get to school, not least because she feared the wrath of her new teacher, Sister Gertrude.

  “Let’s get the bikes.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Jemma.” She put her head out the door to listen for the distinctive rattle of Deb’s taxi. The hot, wet air made her gasp a little. It was quiet, except for the birds, whose song seemed muted by the heat and humidity, and who walked slowly over the lawn, as if they were too exhausted by the weather to fly.

  “We should get Mom,” she said a little later. Her brother shook his head.

  “You try and wake her up,” he said. Jemma was afraid to do that, but after five more minutes of watching their empty driveway her anxiety pushed her down the hall and around the corner to the foot of the stairs and their parents’ door. It was closed, of course, and radiating the sense of forbidding that it sometimes did, so Jemma was sure that if she touched the doorknob she’d get a shock that would blow her across the hall, clear through the picture window in the living room, over all three ravines to land, dead and smoking, on Beach Road. She stared at the knob for a moment before she reached for it slowly, and let her hand hover
just an inch from it before grabbing it. She got a little thrill, a tingle at the base of her spine, but no shock. She turned it, thinking it would be locked, but it wasn’t. The knob turned, but the catch did not disengage. She was about to turn it further when she heard Deb’s horn.

  She ran back down the hall, picked up her bag, and quickly overtook Calvin, who was never in such haste that he didn’t walk along the narrow line of railroad ties that bordered both sides of the driveway. Jemma opened the door, threw her bag in, and clambered in after it.

  “Hey kiddos!” said Deb, not turning around to look at them but smiling into the mirror. From where she was sitting Jemma could see an eye and a cheek, some teeth and a portion of her maroon lips.

  “We’re kind of late,” Jemma said. Calvin climbed in beside her, hauling on the door with both hands to slam it enthusiastically.

  “Don’t jostle the old lady,” Deb said, meaning the car, which was very old, but had broken down on just one occasion, back in the winter. Deb was old, too. She was the wrinkliest person Jemma knew, and had old eyes with big rims of wet pink on the bottom, caught between her white eye and dark eyeliner. She had a head of springy gray hair that was always pushing her hat up off her head, a baseball cap she wore all the time, sometimes under a wool stocking in winter. She’d got it, she told them, by sending in a hundred proofs of purchase from her cigarettes. It had been white, but now was a very lived-in sort of yellow, and said in blue letters across the front, Oh Yeah! “We’ll get there, little Jemma,” she said. “Mary Ann can hurry when she has to. Can’t you, honey?” She patted the dashboard, raising a little cloud of dust that floated with the cigarette smoke in the columns of sun that came through the windshield. “How ’bout this weather?” Deb asked them, turning around as they crested the hill and started to go down. “Like trying to breathe with a wet washcloth stuffed in your mouth, huh?”

  “It’s an affliction,” Calvin said.

  “Not so bad as that,” she said, turning back around as they drifted a little into the grass. “An affliction would be the summer of ’73. Or ovarian cancer and diverticulosis and a no-good husband.”

  “That’s worse,” Calvin agreed. Jemma began to look on the floor for something interesting. She had found all sorts of things before, a broken calculator, a gold pen, various lipsticks, all sorts of change, and a condom, once, though she hadn’t known what it was till after she lost it, when she described it to Calvin. She’d unpeeled it from the floor mat and stuck it in her pocket back in March, while Calvin and Deb were having a conversation. She’d brought it out to examine it every now and then, not sure what it was but knowing it was important. She had planned to show it to some people at recess, especially Andrea Blake, a girl with whom she would have liked to be friends, but who always ignored her, and to whom Jemma never knew what to say. Now she would know. She’d ask her if she wanted to see something neat, and it would all begin from there. Years later Andrea would say, “Do you remember when you showed me that wonderful thing? That’s when we became friends.” But, like a living creature, it worked its way from her pocket during a game of tag—she was always it, and never able to pass on the condition to anyone else. She didn’t look for it long. If she’d looked longer she might have found it before Andrea, who named it a snakeskin, and dutifully informed Sister Mary Fortuna of the likely presence of a poisonous reptile in the schoolyard. It was shortly surrounded by an impenetrable ring of nuns. They came pouring out of the school to form an Ursuline condom-disposal squad, one ring standing facing out toward the children while an inner ring gathered it up for destruction. Sister Gertrude came out in yellow rubber gloves to pick it up and carry it to the boys’ bathroom, while Andrea made the observation that it must be a very poisonous snake whose skin caused such a fuss. Today there was only a penny, stuck with a trace of gum to the floor. Jemma put it in her pocket.

  “Did you hear,” Deb asked, “the latest about the Strangler?” There was a murderer abroad around the river and the bay, who killed whole families, more by stabbing and shooting than by strangling them, but he always left bruises around their necks. “He strangles you,” Deb and Calvin had told each other while Jemma tried not to listen, “after you’re dead!” He’d been killing all summer.

  “Was there something in the paper?” Calvin asked, sitting forward into the space between the front seats.

  “Nothing. Not a word. That’s the latest—nothing. How many days is that without a word?”

  “Twenty-nine,” said Calvin.

  “I think he’s moved,” said Deb.

  “I hope so,” said Jemma. She’d had nightmares about him and his big white hands, as big and white as the hands of Mickey Mouse, soft but strong and deadly.

  “I bet he’s gone on to Buffalo,” Deb said with a sigh. “Or down south, to another bay. Down to Tampa.”

  “Or San Francisco,” Jemma said. “That’s a bay.”

  “Oh I bet he’d like it there. He’s probably one of those.”

  “Those what?” asked Calvin.

  “Nothing.”

  “Those what?” Calvin asked again. He’d already showed Deb how angry he could get if he thought an adult was hiding something from him.

  “Forty-niners,” Deb said. “Gold-diggers. There’s gold out there, you know.”

  “Cape Cod,” Jemma said. “Boston. Honolulu. They’re all on bays.”

  “Anyway, he moved on. To Buffalo, you wait and see.”

  “Do they need killers there?” Calvin asked.

  “No more than anyplace else,” said Deb, and started to talk about the weather again, and how it gave her trouble with her emphysema, and made her awful phlegmy. Jemma scooted down in her seat, curling her knees up and falling to the side, so her cheek rested against the peeling leather seat, and she could see out the rear window. The familiar procession of objects—the tall trees alongside the long road out of the forest; the telephone wires strung alongside General’s Highway; the aerials on the houses just outside of town—passed more quickly than usual. Mary Ann sped along faster than ever before. As they went faster, Jemma felt calmer. She reached a hand up to the open window and spread her fingers against the rushing air, listening to her brother and Deb talk of murder and baseball and the heat.

  “Let me drop you off in the courtyard today,” Deb said as they turned at the statehouse and passed down School Street.

  “No thanks,” said Calvin.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ll honk the horn and you can wave to all the kids. They’ll all die of jealousy. They’ll just all drop down dead.”

  “The usual place will be fine,” Calvin said.

  “One day I’m going to drive you right into the lobby,” Deb said, and laughed so hard she started coughing, and pulled over a half a block from the tree where she usually let them out, so she could double over the wheel and hack and hack. Jemma stood on her seat and peered over the armrest, but Deb waved her out, gasping “I’m fine!” Calvin helped Jemma out of the cab, and held her hand till they were a block from school. Deb drove by just as they were passing through the iron gate. She honked and waved and cackled, drawing stares from every other child in the yard, but Jemma and her brother kept their heads down and their eyes on the ground.

  Sister Gertrude liked to talk about sin, especially on a hot day. For two weeks in their fourth-period religion class they had been learning about Hell, who lived in what level, and the particulars of their suffering. Today there would be a test, after a last-minute review. She’d drawn the familiar triangle on the board—the gentler upper regions of Hell being more exclusive than the lower regions because, as Sister Gertrude said, more people sin worse. It looked to Jemma just like the food pyramid, and she had confused the two in daydreams, so she almost answered once that fruits and grains were punished in the frozen bottom of Hell.

  Sister Gertrude stood behind her desk, obscuring the top of the pyramid with her wimpled head. She scanned the quiet, dark room—she liked to draw the curtains and turn down the
lights during fourth period, because she thought the darkness facilitated profitable spiritual reflection—and suddenly pointed at Martin Marty, two desks to Jemma’s left. “You, Martin,” she said. “A candy-fresser drives his scooter of a cliff because he is too busy unwrapping his taffy to watch where he is going. Where does he go?”

  “To the second circle,” he said immediately. “Where all gluttons are punished.” Jemma had known that one, and wished she’d been asked.

  “Very good,” said Sister Gertrude. She passed by Martin’s desk and deposited a cherry cough drop on it. She was always eating them, and did not consider them candy, though they had only the faintest hint of menthol in them, and they were the most pleasant reward she gave. “Rachel,” she said, “Another candy-fresser is denied her nasty gratification by her wise mother, who will not buy her the pound of chocolate she desires. The girl holds her breath in the middle of the supermarket checkout aisle, thinking to force her mother, but the wise lady ignores her stupid show. The angry, sullen creature holds her breath longer than ever before, even after she passes out, and she suffocates herself. Where will she find herself next?”

  “Oh, that’s a hard one,” Rachel said, from three seats behind Jemma. “It wasn’t a suicide, was it? She didn’t mean to die. She’s doing some gluttony, isn’t she, but she’s angry, too, and the angriness is worse than the gluttoniness, so she should go to the place that hurts more. That’s, um, number five?”

  “Excellent,” said Sister Gertrude. “Excellently reasoned.” She swept by the desk, depositing two cough drops. “Donald Peerman, how will she be punished there?”

  “Oh, something really bad. Poked with hot pokers, right?”

  “Wrong, it is a wet punishment, not a dry. Petra Forsyth?” Jemma’s attention started to drift as Sister Gertrude’s calls fell farther and farther away from her desk, and she thought not of hell, but of her sleeping mother—she wondered what she was dreaming about. She let her eyes fall almost closed so she could imagine it better. Her mother was dreaming of flying, just like Jemma did. Probably it was an ordinary dream, she was walking home up the hill, or walking down the street in town, when suddenly she realized that there was a much better way to get around, and took to the air, not in a leap like Superman, but in strokes, like she was swimming, pulling and kicking herself a little further up into the air with every stroke. Jemma followed her all over town. She was doing laps around the statehouse when Sister Gertrude called on her.