by Chris Adrian
“Cocksucker!” her mother shouted. Her father put down his drink and lit a cigarette.
“Yes, yes. I’m a cocksucker all right. A great big cocksucker. That’s what I’m doing all day and half the night, sucking cock in the OR.” Jemma ran back upstairs and went to her room. It was almost as loud, there, and she could hear every word they said, even her father’s quiet responses. She would have stayed, though, if it weren’t for the thought of the Strangler at the window. She went back to Calvin’s room.
“They’re fighting,” she said.
“I can hear,” he said. He’d turned off the TV and was reading in his bed. “They’ll stop.” He folded his book across his chest and opened the covers. She climbed in, and they listened to the shouts and occasional crashes. Sometimes they heard nothing, and sometimes just a single word. Their father was getting louder and louder, but their mother was loudest of all, and her voice, shrieking higher and higher, finally carried to the room as clear as if she was standing right in front of them.
Calvin moved his hands above the covers, lifting them high when his mother shouted, and low when they heard their father’s voice. “I’m conducting them,” he said. “I can make them do anything I want.”
“Shut up,” Jemma said quietly.
“Really,” he said. “And I started the fight, anyway. It was easy. I just told her I heard him talking to some nurse on the phone. They were making a date for dinner.”
“Shut up,” she said. “It’s not funny.”
“Not at all,” he agreed. “But it was so easy. I saw it in my imagination, and then I made it happen. If they hate each other enough, then it will lift me up. I’ll ride their misery right through Heaven.”
“You’re crazy,” Jemma said.
“I am going,” he said. “Don’t hold on too tight.”
“I’m coming too.”
“You don’t want to. It’s not going to be easy, you know. And the ride will be rough. A fountain of blood, and murder is the rocket’s tail.” He was quiet a moment, and then he shouted, “Hit her with a brick!”
“That’s disgusting.”
“What do you know?” he said, but he hugged her. “Blood calls to blood. If they spill blood, then the strangler will smell it, and come to us. He is coming, and I am going. Do you understand?”
“Shut up.”
“It’s not me, it’s them, calling him. Tell them to shut up.” So she shouted it at the door, not loud enough for them to hear over their own shouting all the way downstairs. But not long after that, they quieted.
“Tell me he’s not going to come,” Jemma said.
“I cannot tell a lie,” Calvin said, and turned on his side. She put her head on his back, using it as a pillow, but not sleeping, though she drifted, and almost fell asleep. For a few brief seconds she rode through the air above Hell in a monkey’s tricycle sidecar, throwing bananas down at the suffering nuns. Calvin sat up suddenly. “He’s here,” said. “Did you hear that?”
“No,” Jemma said.
“I heard his hand against the house.” He got out of the bed, slowly and quietly, and picked up his two biggest lacrosse trophies from his dresser. “Don’t scream until I start hitting him,” he said, and went to stand by the window.
“Okay,” Jemma whispered. She could barely hear herself. She sat up against the headboard, ready to scream, not sure if she could be anymore terrified as she waited and waited, until, impatient for the thing to finally happen, though she did not want it to happen, she imagined it. The Strangler would lift the window and come in one pale, fat hand at a time. She saw Calvin strike him once and twice, with either hand, right in the head, and saw him fall down to the carpet. Then she started screaming, as loud as she could, summoning her parents, who arrived almost instantly, dressed in pajamas and heavy boots, which they turned against the murderer, kicking him in the back and the chest and the head, while Calvin struck him, one-two, one-two, with his bloody trophies. And when he was as good and dead they would wave for Jemma to come to them, and she’d climb out of bed and walk over, and put one bare little foot upon his neck. “Calvin,” she whispered, her eyes shut tight now. “Tell him to hurry up.”
“Synfrosius,” Jemma said to Rob. “It’s a good name. I like that name!” They were lying in bed, getting ready to go out on their new rounds—superhero rounds, Rob called them. A week before there’d been a winnowing among the patients: the botch had raged mightily in a night, and in the course of twelve hours everyone in the PICU and the seven satellite ICUs was dead. Rob never ran away, like the majority of the staff, most just overwhelmed by a process that seemed to be declaring the futility of their work and their lives, some not just driven crazy by the abundance of suffering and death but stricken with the botch-madness, their brains scabbed with black ash and their minds a mess of fear and sadness and rage, so they wept as they ran, and punched in the face anyone who tried to stop them or comfort them. Rob was happy as he worked for the first time in weeks, glad to be fighting so hard but glad too because he could tell it was almost over. Jemma could feel it, from where she spent the night, groaning at the foot of their bed, reaching all over the hospital with her mind, as futile and useless as anyone else, experiencing the pain of the dying but not much succeeding in alleviating it. When the sun rose—another clear, beautiful day dawning over the water—all that was left of their last patient, Dr. Pudding, was three ribs and five kilos of ash (his bed weighed him every morning), and Rob and Dr. Tiller were the only two caretakers left in the unit.
“Lambchop,” said Rob. “I like that one too!” In the past two days he had not entirely been himself. He looked the same, and acted the same, and felt the same, and talking to him you would mostly not know that the botch had started to unfold in his brain, but more and more he would get excited about something like a silly name, or the fabric of their sheets, or the shape and texture of an asparagus newly condensed out of the replicator mist. And more and more Jemma spent all her time around him trying not to do her dry sobbing cry.
“That’s a nickname,” she said gently.
“Lambert Chopin Claflin-Dickens-Dickens-Claflin.”
“Those are all last names.”
“Vivian, then. Poor Vivian!” He didn’t seem to know he was sick, or that he was not acting entirely normal. Jemma kept expecting him to have a moment of high suspicion, when he hurried to the radiology suite to image his brain, but he never did.
“Poor Vivian,” Jemma said. “I’m sorry, Vivian.” Practice should probably have given her a better poker face by now, but she was grateful that Rob, even with his diminishing capacities, was facing away from her. “Sorry everybody,” she said, but she could not feel for everyone else the sort of regret she felt for failing to save Vivian, or miss them like she missed her, or like she missed the parts of Rob that were slipping slowly away.
“That’s a good one,” he said. “Or Pickie. But kids would probably make fun of him or her. Here comes Ass Pickie. There goes Pickie My Nose. Or how about Spanky?”
“Short for what?”
“Spankenmeier? Spankenbush? Spartacus?”
“I kind of like Spartacus.”
“Vivian,” said Rob. Something shifted in his voice, and she knew without even looking in his head that he was suddenly all there again. “Even if it’s a boy. There won’t be any name-calling in the new world.”
“Vivian what?”
“Just Vivian. Or, Vivian!”
“Supermodel Vivian,” Jemma said softly. The baby kicked her.
“Are you all right?” Rob asked, when she started.
“Just a kick,” she said. And then they were both quiet for a while. Jemma, always open to the rest of the hospital except when she actively hid from it, tried not to notice the terrible quiet.
The hospital was changed again, full of empty places and wild places, more than ever a home for survivors. The high death toll of the past week was not limited to the PICU. The Council was almost extinct, only Dr. Snood and Ishmael
remaining of the four Friends, and only Dr. Tiller remaining of the extended twelve, though Cindy and her friends had organized themselves in a sort of alternate Council, which sometimes concurred with and sometimes resisted the senile efforts of the adults, who had stopped legislating and proclaiming. Dr. Tiller and Dr. Snood used the vestiges of their authority to organize protection for the sleeping children—no one younger than eighteen was awake now—and to organize the children themselves, more space allotted now for the medical dormitories than for the palliative adult wards.
“I put you back!” Monserrat had declared to Jemma, just before she died. “It is in my power, to give it away, my high place. It is for you again, my baby.” (She wasn’t entirely sane, and confused Jemma alternately with her daughter, her granddaughter, and Ricky Ricardo). “Now you are me. I give you the power, a different power, so you can make it all better again.”
“It’s all right,” Jemma said. “Don’t worry about anything.” She’d come to the death, drawn by her compulsion and by Monserrat’s request. Dr. Tiller was there, too, along with Dr. Snood, regal zombies in their immaculate clothes, their lips black and their ears shredding at the edges into papery ash. Ishmael stood at the head of the bed, entirely hale and handsome as ever, in a sane and quiet interlude.
Dr. Snood spoke. “A brief examination of the law will tell you that the office…” Dr. Tiller put a hand on his arm. “Shush, Darling,” she said. “She’s just raving.”
“Who has to tell you?” Monserrat asked Jemma, crying and smiling and grabbing her around her neck to press her face into her boobs, still wonderfully full, though her belly was collapsed down to her spine. “Who has to tell you, to do the next thing? Who else could it, besides you? Vivian, Jane, Ishmael, everyone wasting our time but the whole world, all the children just waiting for you to say the word, my sweet Desi. Oh, that smile! Oh, that hair! Sing to me, darling. Sing to the children and the whole world. The gates are waiting—open them!”
“It’s all right,” Jemma said, hardly batting an eye as she wove and placed a series of blocks in her thalamus, blocking the botch when it tried to make her scream. It was like playing tennis in the dark, but she could have played ten games at once. Every day brought her more power, and made her feel more useless.
“Sing, sing!” Monserrat screamed, so Jemma uttered soft babalus into her chest until Monserrat began to weep. “You!” she said, before a minute of singing went by, all of them indulging her now with the mournful crooning. “You!” She pushed Jemma away, sat up, pointed square in her face, and died. Ishmael chose that moment to totally lose his mind, tearing off his shirt and scratching at his flesh. “You!” he echoed, pointing at Jemma. “You!” With his non-pointing hand he scooped ash from the corpse, spat in it, and smeared his face. That was four days previous, and ever after he could be seen wandering up and down the ramp, clothed only in smears of ash, screaming at the carpet and accusing anyone he met of explicitly detailed crimes. Jemma could always feel him, a presence in her mind even uglier than Pickie had been.
“Seven days,” Rob said, reaching behind himself to put a hand on her belly.
“If it’s on time. Nobody was ever on time, in my family.”
“My sisters were early.”
“Cheetarah. I always wanted that to be my name.”
“Have you been wondering…”
“What?”
“If… I’m afraid to say it. It might be a jinx.”
“Give me a clue.”
“What if it’s only… if when by the time we land there are only two people over twenty-one left in the hospital?”
“Ishmael and Dr. Snood. That’ll suck.”
“Not them.”
“Don’t say it; you’re right. It’s a jinx. I used to do that all the time. Sure is a quiet call night, and, Where are all the patients? My medicine senior got so mad at me once. I thought she was going to slap me. If you say it, they will come, she told me. If you say it, it won’t be us.”
“We won’t talk about it.”
“We never were talking about it.”
“I never mentioned it.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Jemma said, but she clutched him suddenly, squeezing and squeezing, as if just by holding tight enough with her body and her mind she could keep any more of him from slipping away.
There are days left, and days, but already I am nostalgic for the watching, and anxious for Jemma’s end. For all my watching, and all my waiting, now I would rather that the end not come at all, the baby not come at all, the hospital never land ashore. I must have known, when I made my own choice, and did my deed, that the consequences would claim Jemma, too, just as they claimed everyone else in the world. But still I am hoping for an ending where she steps out of the hospital and lives in the new world with her baby and these seven hundred and one other children, even though I know she would not belong there any more than I would.
And it would be even better than stopping what’s coming, if I could roll back all the time between her and her last happiness, or my last happiness. I contain all the past, but have no power over it, and it would take more than an angel to fly with her through the blowing ash of the botch-time, past her ascent over the hospital populace, past her wedding and her unveiling and her great night, past the subtle hints of her pregnancy and her slumbering power, past even the night of the storm, though I think she was happy enough, doing the screwing with Rob Dickens that conceived the last baby of the old world and the first baby of the new one.
But why stop there, when we can fly back past every death, her first lover in his crumpled car—see how the dents unfold and the blood flows cleanly off the white metal? Her mother unburns in her kitchen, her father gets a little stronger, day after day, as his cancer dies back, until he is his old self again, and Jemma’s life is almost again a life free from a permanent shadow of unhappiness. A little further back and Calvin might be doused, his organs stuffed back in their proper place, his tongue fetched from his right hand and his eyeballs from his left. Make him whole again, and Jemma is happy again. No death has touched her life and she thinks that everyone she loves is going to live forever.
But I wouldn’t stop there. As long as we are moving, let the time fly backward, and shrink them, Jemma and Calvin both, down until they fit in my own favorite moment, or the moment, anyway, from whenceforth it might all have been different. Jemma and Calvin are sitting on their roof, and instead of pushing her away, a bomb to destroy the adult world he hates and does not understand, let him hold on to her instead, and show her the stars above the roof, and tell her the names—different from what he’s learned in books—that he’s made up for them. Never mind the sins and pleasures and miseries of the old world, never mind the unknowable, indescribable satisfactions of the world to come, let me just watch them there, and let them just stay there, and let all of us finally be happy.
A bucket in one hand, a sponge in the other, Jemma and Rob made their rounds. A few days before she’d started out meaning to wash away the accumulations of ash—the piles in every corner, the greasy smears on the walls, the half-inch-thick layer along the ramp railing—but it made her feel ill just to approach the stuff, let alone touch it, and she remembered too well the barfing of her first trimester, and she couldn’t bear the thought of dealing with the drifted piles, or making mud with it in her bucket. Rob would have done it—he would have done anything she told him—but she didn’t want him covered in it, either. Every part of his brain that might have countermanded an order from her was gone. He was pliable and sweet and happy and sometimes just looking at him was enough to make her cry. She settled for washing the children, all of them asleep now, from the babies in the crèche to Josh Swift, settled in the arms of Cindy Flemm in their old classroom. The process of death and sleep had just about run its course: no one aged twenty-one or younger was awake, and no one older was alive except for her and Rob and Ishmael.
Every three days they rounded with the b
uckets—that was how long it took for the dust to settle again upon the children—but they visited every one of them every day, turning them in their beds or fluffing their pillows or arranging in a crib the animals that in her absence always seemed to creep closer to the infants. She suspected Ishmael was moving them, as a taunt. They saw very little of him, though they could sometimes hear his voice come down the ramp from a higher floor. Rob was afraid of him, and clung to her every time they heard him laughing or screaming.
They were simple rounds, if exhausting, in their own way. There was no differential diagnosis to generate, no medication to dose, no physical exam to inflict upon the child. Instead there was hair to brush and there were pajamas to smooth and diapers to check. They’d all stopped excreting days before but she still peeked in the diaper or the underwear to make sure they were clean. She’d pulled the last nasogastric tubes a week ago—they were disfiguring and unnecessary. What sustained the children was not food, and they needed their enteric formula less than they needed Rob to play the banjo for them. When their feeds were on they radiated a sense of annoyance; when Rob played they were more deeply serene.
Supervising Rob was a job in itself. She’d find him scrubbing too hard or trying to dunk a toddler head first into the bucket, or distracted by a jellyfish at the window, Kidney naked and half-washed, forgotten on the floor beside his feet. More than forgetful, he heard things differently than she intended them. She’d found him the day before writing on Ella Thims with a thin-tipped permanent marker, his same backslanting lefty cursive flowing across the child’s chest and belly, arms and legs, around and around in a spiral on his back: once there was a boy named Rob he had a dog named Joe, once there was a boy named Rob he had a dog named Joe, once there was a boy named Rob he had a dog named Joe.
“What are you doing?” she’d asked him.
“Making her a story.”
“You were supposed to tell her a story,” she said. “They like it when you do that. They like your voice.”
