by Chris Adrian
“Uh huh. Like this.”
“Not like this,” she said, her tone gentle and patient, but he started to cry as soon as he understood that she was correcting him. It didn’t take much to make him cry; reminding him to brush his teeth or pointing out that his shoes were untied or that he wasn’t wearing any pants. “You don’t love me,” he would say to every perceived criticism. “Of course I do,” she’d say, and it would only take a kiss to make him forget that he had felt sad.
“I found another baby!” he said that morning, rushing up to her when she came into the conference room, her old classroom, where Josh and Cindy and Ethel and Kidney and all the rest of her old class, except Pickie, were housed, laid out in a row, a little ward of friends, heads to the window and feet to the wall. If their room was nicer than some others it was only because she had been decorating in there the longest, and not necessarily because she liked or knew them all better than the other sleepers. There were mobiles for every bed, each one different, appropriate to the age or personality of the person beneath it, so Valium had a string of winged donkeys while Josh and Cindy had pictures of the two of them together, with music that played only within a spherical field three feet in diameter. On the wall there was jungle; on the ceiling a sky. When it was dark you could cover the windows and play the holobox, and manufacture any environment you liked: desert or forest or endless grassy plains, anything but the ocean.
“It’s Kidney,” she said. “You should put her back in her bed.”
“But I found her. Another one! They’re everywhere, aren’t they?”
“She needs her sleep,” Jemma said. “Why don’t you put her back?”
“Okay,” he said. “If you say so.” He didn’t cry, but he looked at her like she was crazy. He was always picking up the smaller ones and presenting them to her, as if there was something else he thought she should be doing with them or for them. He never said, Wake this child or Make him better or Make it happen, but those were the words that she heard in her head whenever he ran up, as proud as a retrieving dog, to present her with another.
She washed them in order, Kidney first, unfolding her arms and legs out of her pajamas while Rob peered in the other beds and settled on Ethel, starting with her left foot. If she directed him he’d do a better job, but today she was tired of it, and rather than give him a plan, she just let him wash the foot over and over. When she got as far as Ethel, they could talk. She dipped her sponge in the water—the bucket kept it warm—and washed the little feet, always the dirtiest part, though the child hadn’t walked anywhere in weeks. Her round calves and knobby knees, the thin legs and the bottom, all areas covered by clothes but the dust crept in everywhere—she even had to brush it out of her mouth, a tricky business. She usually just combed her hair, but today she washed it, fetching a special basin from the replicator and lathering up two big handfuls of fancy-shampoo suds made from one of Vivian’s recipes. “It’s almost fun,” she said to Rob. “I’m almost enjoying myself.” When he didn’t respond she turned to look at him but he wasn’t in the room.
She found him without leaving. She could feel him upstairs, puttering in the PICU. Sometimes he went back there to stare at all the machines, pushed up into corners, or to hold his hand over one of the kids—it was mostly teenagers—and say, “I need to do something for him.” “There’s nothing more to do,” she’d tell him. “You’re all done.” He never believed her, but he always let her lead him away. She’d go fetch him out when she was done here.
Kidney, then Valium, then States’-Rights, then Magnolia. Everybody had their bath, and Jemma had another hundred minutes of good work. It was stupid to feel such a sense of accomplishment, when they were all spiffed up, when Kidney was changed into a new set of pumpkin pajamas, Ethel’s head was freshly shaved and painted, no longer a morose black spot but something else, always more cheery but different every few days, a plane-face with a propeller nose or a shark mouth, and today a yellow flower-face with blue eyes and a wide green smile. It was like making one’s bed—they would only get dirty again like a bed would be slept in again, but there was something so satisfying in it that it really did cheer her up more than anything had in weeks. She found she could almost forget about mad Ishmael wandering and shouting, about Rob, ruined and preserved, about all the uniquely gruesome deaths—John Grampus’s howls of outrage and accusations of betrayal directed at every surface of the hospital, Dr. Snood’s bright eyes glistening in the ash-filled cavity of his face, and the never-solved mystery of what lay under Dr. Tiller’s headdress; Jemma had paused forever with her finger on the fabric, ready to finally lift it, but in the end she left it alone. She knew she could do this final work for as many days as were left to her.
Josh was last, his body almost as familiar to her now as Rob’s. She was wiping idly in his groin, lingering a little too long there—she’d convinced herself that he was a gauge, that the oldest would wake first, and that his penis would wake up before he did, and when it rose he would rise shortly after it, and then the next thing would happen—all the children awake again and her baby would be born and… something else. Dry land or the hospital taking to the sky instead of the sea or something she couldn’t even imagine, not even her—something the children were all dreaming about, something they say with their darting closed eyes, something she was too old to hear or know or understand. “Five,” she said, counting the swipes. “Six, seven, eight.” The penis slept.
“I found another one!” Rob said, startling her. It’s not what it looks like, she wanted to say, pulling up Josh’s pants. I was consulting the oracle! But he wouldn’t understand, and probably wouldn’t notice. She took a deep breath and spoke in a very soft voice. She didn’t want to see him cry again.
“You’ve got to learn to let them lie where they are,” she said, turning around. She didn’t cry out this time, but she made a little sound when she saw the dripping child in Rob’s arms, and smelled the ocean on him. It was Pickie Beecher, pale and naked, a strand of kelp wrapped around his legs and belly, foam still on his chest, and a spray of leaves caught up in his now full head of curly brown hair.
“He’s already wet,” Rob said. “Do we still have to clean him?”
Jemma held the twig, tracing with her fingertips the edges of the leaves and the rough surface of the bark. She didn’t know what it was—it wasn’t any of the few plants she could recognize, holly or mistletoe or pine or poinsettia, holiday bushes whose leaves she’d traced out on blots of construction paper in grade school. The leaves were waxy but not dark, and though she found two berries they were purple, not white, and looked like they might have dropped out of a box of cereal. It smelled like nothing she’d ever encountered before, a little piney and a little minty, a little bit of a deep, wet, earthy smell, a little bit of chocolate, but then mostly something she didn’t even recognize, and could not describe.
It was so thickly tangled in Pickie’s hair that it took her an hour to extract it. More time than Rob spent washing the sea-smell off of him Jemma spent unwinding strands from between the leaves. She could have cut it out in a moment, but she had a feeling that it would have been a crime to violate a single curl. It was the thickest, softest, shiniest hair Jemma had ever seen, the hair she’d always wanted, the very opposite of her own hair. When she had the twig out of it, she spent another twenty minutes washing the hair, and appreciating how it rejected Vivian’s luscious, sweet-smelling shampoo and conditioner—the shampoo wouldn’t lather and the conditioner seemed to just slide off his head—as if it were already too perfect to need any of that stuff. As she blew it dry she knew she was too interested in it, that it would be better just to be jealous than to be rapt and worshipful like this, and anyway it felt like being unfaithful to Magnolia’s admittedly less wonderful hair. Still, she couldn’t help herself.
“Where have you been?” Rob kept asking Pickie, as he washed him, then as he dressed him in a pair of pajamas, thick flannel and printed with trains, though it wasn’t cold anywh
ere in the hospital except on the roof, and as he situated a pair of caboose-shaped slippers on his feet. Jemma asked it of him too, if not out loud, and tried to read off him the history of the past twenty-four days. She couldn’t tell where he’d been. When she tried all she could see was a reprise of her own daydreams about him: she saw him chased by waves, and walking through drowned cities, but not where he’d actually floated to, and not the land where grew the tree that had given over the twig to him. More obvious than the story of his travels was the simple fact of his health—everything that was wrong with him before now was put right. He wasn’t any longer a nauseating blot on her mind but just a sleeping boy, as ordinary as Jarvis or Valium or Marcus.
“He smells nice now,” Rob said. “He smelled nice before. It was a waste of water, to wash him all up, but now he sure is pretty.”
“Yes,” Jemma said.
“Not prettier than you! I didn’t say that.”
“I know,” she said. “He is prettier, though. He’s prettier than anybody. Look at him.”
Rob whistled slowly. “Those are fine, fine pj’s,” he said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Jemma said, and trying not to compare them, but it was like trying not to notice the two sides of the horizon, or the difference between the moon and the night sky, it was so obvious. Rob was becoming an abomination, the image and shell of his old self. Here she was, finally stronger than death, it seemed, since she felt sure it was only the constant exercise of her power, conscious and unconscious, that kept him from falling apart entirely, and yet look what she got. “Let’s put him to bed,” she said, and Rob pointed out that he didn’t have a bed, yet, and shouldn’t they make him one?
Jemma made the frame; Rob stuffed the mattress, repetitive work that he couldn’t fuck up. There were still hundreds of hospital beds in the place, but she didn’t want to put Pickie in one of those. He wasn’t sick, and she wouldn’t put upon him any of the old or new accoutrements of the hospital, no monitors or embolism stockings or ventilators waiting to pounce on him. She had it half-done before she realized it was a copy of Calvin’s old bed, a wide canoe that came out of the replicator in ten easy-to-assemble pieces, with edges that stuck fast once pressed together. Rob had artificial feathers in his hair, and had somehow managed to stuff a lot of them down his pants, but the mattress was almost done by the time Jemma had finished the frame. She helped him with the last of it. They lay Pickie on top of it, his head on a pillow shaped like a life preserver. Just as Rob protested that he looked dead, lying on his back with his hands folded on his chest, he mumbled and snored, and turned on his side, flexing his knee and drawing a hand up under his cheek. They put his slippers at the bottom of the boat, along with a few things Jemma thought he would like, a teddy bear and a squeaky toy shaped like a flank steak and a leaf from the twig.
Rob said there was still something wrong, and stole a rabbit from Kidney’s bed, a creepy-looking thing with purple fur and yellow eyes. Rob put it under his arm and said, “That’s better.” Jemma bent down over the bed and pushed his hair back from his forehead, then kissed him there, the first time she’d ever been so tender with him—always before he had ducked away when she felt compelled by obligation to try, and before there was the horrible smell of his breath, and the simple wrongness of him that repelled her. Now there was just his soft hair and his pale skin, his wet pink lips and his breath that smelled of milk and salt.
“Goodnight Pickie,” she said. He opened his eyes and said, “Good morning, Mama.”
No one else woke up, though she ran from bed to bed, kissing them frantically, and Rob did the same, kissing Ethel and Jarvis from head to toe. He would keep trying over the next few days, kissing at random, always waiting with the same goofy, expectant smile, and always crying when he was disappointed, and saying again “They don’t like me.”
Pickie didn’t stay awake for long, either; he’d nod off in an instant, then come just as suddenly awake again, without provocation. Kissing him didn’t make any more difference, after that first time, than shouting his name, or tickling him, or pinching him, or even giving him a gentle sternal rub.
“I’m hungry,” he said. They could have just fed him right there, but Rob wanted to go on a picnic. So they went downstairs, Jemma in the middle as they walked, all holding hands. Pickie looked around at all the spaces empty of people, but didn’t ask where everybody was, and only asked once, looking down into Kidney’s bed, “Why are they all sleeping?”
He walked differently and talked differently than before; his steps wandered, and sometimes he put one foot in front of the other, or hopped for no discernible reason, and his speech was less fluid than before, he lisped a little and had trouble making irregular plurals. In the cafeteria he broke away and ran to grab at the fruit and vegetables still dancing at the salad bar, entertaining himself while Jemma put together their picnic basket and Rob synthesized gallon after gallon of ice cream. She let Pickie grab some apples and put them in the basket, and he put his finger on the squares of wax paper she folded over the sandwiches while she tied them down with bows of twine. “I want a hamburger,” he said, and she did not remind him that he was a vegetarian.
“Come away from there,” she said, boxing up a steaming berry pie, because he was squatting in a corner, poking at a pile of ash. He wiped his finger on his pajama bottom and ran to her side, then looked up at her. “It smells like french fries,” he said, offering her his finger.
“I hadn’t noticed,” she said, gathering Rob away from his ice cream. He had made twenty different flavors and couldn’t be convinced that it was impractical to take them all the way to the roof, and spent five minutes almost in tears trying to choose between them.
“Strawberry is so nice,” he said to Pickie, who nodded sympathetically. “And Honey-Lavender is very sweet. Caramello is kind. Ginger is not the best, certainly, but her feelings would be hurt so bad, so bad, if we left her behind. Mango is outrageous. She can stay, probably.” In the end they each picked one and got going, taking the long way up because Rob wanted to walk, and because Jemma wanted to see how Pickie reacted to the familiar sites of the hospital.
He just stared as they passed the monuments to the early dead, speaking only when he caught sight of the toy, still turning and ticking and hooting and ringing in the lobby, to ask if he could go play with it later, and only showing any emotion when they heard Ishmael cry out from a lower floor, his deep groan rising up into a high, trailing shriek. Pickie clung to her and said, “I’m afraid.” Rob had dropped his ice cream and was sitting on the floor with his hands over his ears.
“It’s just a raccoon,” Jemma said.
“Don’t let him get me again,” Pickie said.
“Again?” Jemma said, but he wouldn’t speak any more of it. She petted Rob’s head and pried his hands away from his ears and told him everything was all right. He clung to her also, forgetting his ice cream, so the going was a little slow for the last two floors. As soon as they got out into the daylight, they both sprang away and went capering over the grass.
“Here we are,” she thought, after it was all set up. Another picnic; she was a little sick of them, in the way that she was a little sick of everything, sick of rounding with the bucket which was monotonous in a way that was similar to the old monotony, temporarily relieved by her gift—once again her part was small and not entirely necessary. It wasn’t hard to imagine—she is dead and little six-legged robots do the work of washing the children, combing their hair and shining their faces, fluffing their pillows, singing to them, a choir of broken mechanical-nose voices. In that moment she was sick of Rob, too sweet and too stupid and too empty, and sick already of the new Pickie, usual and dull and likely to run screaming from a feast of blood. Two days past her due date, she was sick of being pregnant, sick of her backache and clumsy walk and the false contractions. She looked out at the water, at the flat calm ocean and the clouds marching again like huge animals over the horizon (she’d seen those, too, the
elephant and the giraffe and even the toothy sandworm, and was sick of all of them) and thought how thoroughly tired she was of waiting.
The botch had taken none of Rob’s gymnastic skill, but Pickie had obviously had his bounce washed out. He did clumsy somersaults, pedaling his feet to get his bottom turned over his shoulders, while Rob did perfect back handsprings in a moving circle all around him. He turned and twisted into cartwheels; Pickie stood and hopped from one foot to the other, waving his hands above his head. It took her a moment to realize that they were performing for her. Rob turned again and did cartwheels toward Pickie, then twisted and did a flip clear over his head to land behind him. They both threw out their arms and hands, seeming to offer her the empty sky and the empty sea and more empty days of waiting. She clapped politely, trying not to weep, because she knew it would just get Rob started crying if she did. Pickie sprang up and ran toward her, his arms out, his face so utterly different from how it had been before. She steeled herself for one of his brutal, squeezing hugs, but he only leaned against her like an ordinary child, and sighed in her neck, and said, “I’m having such a good time at the party.”
There is a face at her window that she does not see, and a presence that she does not sense, perhaps because she simply does not wish to. His rage and gall ought to be a blight on her vision; it ought to call through the stone and steel; it ought to shine through the glass. But she dances blithely with Rob while Pickie naps under the table, and she puts Pickie in the tub without noticing, though when she comes out of the bathroom Ishmael is looking right at her face. After she and Rob sit on edge of the bed, mouths locked, each clutching and rubbing at the other’s back, he presses his face closer to the window, and a pale circle of nose blooms against the glass, plainly visible, but now she is far too distracted to notice. More and more of his face—a piece of forehead, an eye, the chin with the thick, madman’s beard—appears as they go on, and at some point he cannot contain himself anymore and pounds a hand against the wall. Still, there is nothing for him, from her, except that she spares him a thought as she falls asleep, deep in the arms of her abominable companion.
