A Better Angel

by Chris Adrian

  Accidental confidences, or accidentally fabricated secrets, are no safer. Margaret misunderstands; she thinks I am fishing for validation. She is a professional validator, with skills honed by a thousand hours of role playing—she has been both the querulous young lesbian and the supportive adult. “But there’s no reason to change,” she tells me. “You don’t have to be ashamed of who you are.”

  This is a lesson I learned long ago, from my mother, who really was a lesbian, after she was a nun but before she was a wife. “I did not give it up because it was inferior to anything,” she told me seriously, the same morning she found me in the arms of Shelley Woo, my neighbor and one of the few girls I was ever able to lure into a sleep-over. We had not, like my mother assumed, spent the night practicing tender, heated frottage. We were hugging as innocently as two stuffed animals. “But it’s all right,” she kept saying against my protests. So I know not to argue with Margaret’s assumption, either.

  It makes me pensive, having become a perceived lesbian. I wander the ward thinking, “Hello, nurse!” at every one of them I see. I sit at the station, watching them come and go, spinning the big lazy susan of misfortune that holds all the charts. I can imagine sliding my hands under their stylish scrubs—not toothpaste-green like Dr. Chandra’s scrubs, but hot pink or canary yellow or deep-sea blue, printed with daisies or sun faces or clouds or even embroidered with dancing hula girls—and pressing my fingers in the hollows of their ribs. I can imagine taking off Nancy’s rhinestone granny glasses with my teeth, or biting so gently on the ridge of her collarbone. The charge nurse—a woman from the Philippines named Jory—sees me opening and closing my mouth silently, and asks if there is something wrong with my jaw. I shake my head. There’s nothing wrong. It’s only that I am trying to open wide enough for an imaginary mouthful of her soft brown boob.

  If it’s this easy for me to do, to imagine the new thing, then is he somewhere wondering what it would feel like to press a cheek against my scarred belly, or to gather my hair in his fists? When I was little, my pediatrician, Dr. Sawyer, used to look in my pants every year and say, “Just checking to make sure everything is normal.” I imagine an exam, and imagine him imagining it with me. He listens with his ear on my chest and back, and when it is time to look in my pants he stares and says, “It’s not just normal, it’s extraordinary!”

  A glowing radiance has just burst from between my legs, and is bathing him in converting rays of glory, when he comes hurrying out of the doctor’s room across from the station. He drops his clipboard and apologizes to no one in particular, and glances at me as he straightens up. I want him to smile and look away, to duck his head in an aw-shucks gesture, but he just nods stiffly, then walks away. I watch him pass around the corner, then give the lazy susan a hard spin. If my own chart comes to rest before my eyes, it will mean that he loves me.

  See the monkey? He has chronic kidney doom. His kidneys are always yearning toward things—other monkeys and trees and people and different varieties of fruit. He feels them stirring in him, and pressing against his flank whenever he gets near to something that he likes. When he tells a girl monkey or a boy monkey that his kidneys want to hug them, they slap him or punch him or kick him in the eye. At night his kidneys ache wildly. He is always swollen and moist-looking. He smells like a toilet because he can only pee when he doesn’t want to, and every night he asks himself, How many pairs of crisp white slacks can one monkey ruin?

  Suffer, monkey, suffer!

  Every fourth night he is on call. He stays in the hospital from six in the morning until six the following evening, awake all night on account of various intern-sized crises. I see him walking in and out of rooms, or peering at the two-foot-long flow sheets that lean on giant clipboards on the walls by every door, or looking solemnly at the nurses as they castigate him for slights against their patients or their honor—an unsigned order, an incorrectly dosed medication, the improper washing of his hands. I catch him in the corridor in what I think is a posture of despair, sunk down outside Wayne’s door with his face in his knees, and I think that he has heard about me and Wayne, and it’s broken his heart. But I have already dismissed Wayne days ago. We were like two IV poles passing in the night, I told him.

  Dr. Chandra is sleeping, not despairing, not snoring but breathing loud through his mouth. I step a little closer to him, close enough to smell him—coffee and hair gel and something like pickles. A flow sheet lies discarded beside him, so from where I stand I can see how much Wayne has peed in the last twelve hours. I stoop next to him and consider sitting down and falling asleep myself, because I know it would constitute a sort of intimacy to mimic his posture and let my shoulder touch his shoulder, to close my eyes and maybe share a dream with him. But before I can sit, Nancy comes creeping down the hall in her socks, a barf basin half full of warm water in her hands. A phalanx of nurses appears in the hall behind her, each of them holding a finger to her lips as Nancy kneels next to Dr. Chandra, puts the bucket on the floor, and takes his hand away from his leg so gently I think she is going to kiss it before she puts it in the water. I just stand there, afraid that he’ll wake up as I’m walking away, and think I’m responsible for the joke. Nancy and the nurses all disappear around the corner to the station, so it’s just me and him again in the hall. I drum my fingers against my head, trying to think of a way to get us both out of this, and realize it’s just a step or two to the dietary cart. I take a straw and kneel down next to him. It’s a lot of volume, and I imagine, as I drink, that it’s flavored by his hand. When I throw it up later it seems like the best barf I’ve ever done, because it is for him, and as Nancy holds my hair back for me and asks me what possessed me to drink so much water at once I think to him, It was for you, baby, and feel both pathetic and exalted.

  I follow him around for a couple of call nights, not saving him again from any more mean-spirited jokes, but catching him scratching or picking when he thinks no one is looking, and wanting, like a fool, to be the hand that scratches or the finger that picks, because it would be so interesting and gratifying to touch him like that, or touch him in any way, and I wonder and wonder what I’m doing as I creep around with increasingly practiced nonchalance, looking bored while I sit across from him, listening to him cajole the radiologist on the phone at one in the morning, when I could be sleeping, or riding my pole, when he is strange-looking, and cannot like me, and talks funny, and is rumored to be an intern of small brains. But I see him stand in the hall for five minutes, staring at an abandoned tricycle, and he puts his palm against a window and bows his head at the blinking lights on the bridge in a way that makes me want very much to know what he is thinking, and I see him, from a hiding place behind a bin full of dirty sheets, hopping up and down in a hall he thinks is empty save for him, and I am sure he is trying to fly away.

  Hiding on his fourth call night in the dirty utility room while he putters with a flow sheet at the door to the room across the hall, I realize that it could be easier than this, and so when he’s moved on, I go back to my room and watch the meditation channel for a little while, then practice a few moans, sounding at first too distressed, then not distressed enough, then finally getting it just right before I push the button for the nurse. Nancy is off tonight. It’s Jory who comes, and finds me moaning and clutching at my belly. I get Tylenol and a touch of morphine, but am careful to moan only a little less, so Jory calls Dr. Chandra to come evaluate me.

  It’s romantic, in its way. The lights are low, and he puts his warm, freshly washed hands on my belly to push in every quadrant, a round of light palpation, a round of deep. He speaks very softly, asking me if it hurts more here, or here, or here. “I’m going to press in on your stomach and hold my hand there for a second, and I want you to tell me if it makes it feel better or worse when I let go.” He listens to my belly, then takes me by the ankle, extending and flexing my hip.

  “I don’t know,” I say when he asks me if that made the pain better or worse. “Do it again.”
<
br />   See the bunny? She has high colonic ruin, a very fancy disease. Only bunnies from the very best families get it, but when she cries bloody tears and the terrible spiders come crawling out of her bottom, she would rather be poor, and not even her fancy robot bed can comfort her, or even distract her. When her electric pillow feeds her dreams of happy bunnies playing in the snow, she only feels jealous and sad, and she bites her tongue while she sleeps, and bleeds all night while the bed dabs at her lips with cotton balls on long steel fingers. In the morning a servant drives her to the Potty Club, where she sits with other wealthy bunny girls on a row of crystal toilets. They are supposed to be her friends, but she doesn’t like them at all.

  Suffer, bunny, suffer!

  When he visits I straighten up, carefully hiding the books that Margaret brought me, biographies of Sappho and Billie Jean King and H.D. She entered quietly into my room, closed the door, and drew the blinds before producing them from out of her pants and repeating that my secret was safe with her, though there was no need for it to be secret, and nothing to be ashamed of, and she would support me as fully in proclaiming my homosexuality as she did in the hiding of it. She has already conceived of a banner to put over my bed, a rainbow hung with stars, on the day that I put away all shame and dark feelings. I hide the books because I know all would really be lost if he saw them and assumed the assumption. I do not want to be just his young lesbian friend. I lay out refreshments, spare cookies and juices and puddings from the meal trays that come, though I get all the food I can stand from the sauce.

  I don’t have many dates, on the outside. Rumors of my scarred belly or my gastrostomy tube drive most boys away before anything can develop, and the only boys that pay persistent attention to me are the creepy ones looking for a freak. I have better luck in here, with boys like Wayne, but those dates are still outside the usual progressions, the talking more and more until you are convinced they actually know you, and the touching more and more until you are pregnant and wondering if this guy ever even liked you. There is nothing normal about my midnight trysts with Dr. Chandra, but there’s an order about them, and a progression. I summon him and he puts his hands on me, and he orders an intervention, and he comes back to see if it worked or didn’t. For three nights he stands there, watching me for a few moments, leaning on one foot and then the other, before he asks me if I need anything else. All the things I need flash through my mind, but I say, “No,” and he leaves, promising to come back and check on me later, but never doing it. Then, on the fourth night, he does his little dance and asks, “What do you want to do when you grow up? I mean, when you’re bigger. When you’re out of school, and all that.”

  “Medicine,” I say. “Pediatrics. What else?”

  “Aren’t you sick of it?” he asks. He is backing toward the door, but I have this feeling like he’s stepping closer to the bed.

  “Maybe. But I have to do it.”

  “You could do anything you want,” he says, not sounding like he means it.

  “What else could Tarzan become, except lord of the jungle?”

  “He could have been a dancer, if he wanted. Or an ice cream man. Whatever he wanted.”

  “Did you ever want to do anything else, besides this?”

  “Never. Not ever.”

  “How about now?”

  “Oh,” he says. “Oh, no. I don’t think so. No, I don’t think so.” He startles when his pager vibrates. He looks down at it. “I’ve got to go. Just tell Jory if the pain comes back again.”

  “Come over here for a second,” I say. “I’ve got to tell you something.”

  “Later,” he says.

  “No, now. It’ll just take a second.” I expect him to leave, but he walks over and stands near the bed.

  “What?”

  “Would you like some juice?” I ask him, though what I really meant to do was to accuse him, ever so sweetly, of being the same as me, of knowing the same indescribable thing about this place and about the world. “Or a cookie?”

  “No thanks,” he says. As he passes through the door I call out for him to wait, and to come back. “What?” he says again, and I think I am just about to know how to say it when the code bell begins to chime. It sounds like an ice cream truck, but it means someone on the floor is trying to die. He jumps in the air like he’s been goosed, then takes a step one way in the hall, stops, starts the other way, then goes back, so it looks like he’s trying to decide whether to run toward the emergency or away from it.

  I get up and follow him down the hall, just in time to see him run into Ella Thims’s room. From the back of the crowd at the door I can see him standing at the head of the bed, looking depressed and indecisive, a bag mask held up in his hand. He asks someone to page the senior resident, then puts the mask over Ella’s face. She’s bleeding from her nose and mouth, and from her ostomy sites. The blood shoots around inside the mask when he squeezes the bag, and he can’t seem to get a tight seal over Ella’s chin. The mask keeps slipping while the nurses ask him what he wants to do.

  “Well,” he says. “Um. How about some oxygen?” Nancy finishes getting Ella hooked up to the monitor and points out that she’s in a bad rhythm. “Let’s get her some fluid,” he says. Nancy asks if he wouldn’t like to shock her, instead. “Well,” he says. “Maybe!” Then I get pushed aside by the PICU team, called from the other side of the hospital by the chiming of the ice cream bell. The attending asks Dr. Chandra what’s going on, and he turns even redder, and says something I can’t hear, because I am being pushed farther and farther from the door as more people squeeze past me to cluster around the bed, ring after ring of saviors and spectators. Pushed back to the nursing station, I am standing in front of Jory, who is sitting by the telephone, reading a magazine.

  “Hey, honey,” she says, not looking at me. “Are you doing okay?”

  See the cat? He has died. Feline leukemic indecisiveness is always terminal. Now he just lies there. You can pick him up. Go ahead. Bring him home and put him under your pillow, and pray to your parents or your stuffed plush Jesus to bring him back, and say to him, “Come back, come back.” He will be smellier in the morning, but no more alive. Maybe he is in a better place, maybe his illness could not follow him where he went, or maybe everything is the same, the same pain in a different place. Maybe there is nothing at all, where he is. I don’t know, and neither do you.

  Goodbye, cat, goodbye!

  Ella Thims died in the PICU, killed, it was discovered, by too much potassium in her sauce. It put her heart in that bad rhythm they couldn’t get her out of, though they worked over her till dawn. She’d been in it for at least a while before she was discovered, so it was already too late when they put her on the bypass machine. It made her dead alive—her blood was moving in her, but by mid-morning of the next day she was rotting inside. Dr. Chandra, it was determined, was the chief architect of the fuck-up, assisted by a newly graduated nurse who meticulously verified the poisonous contents of the solution and delivered them without comment. Was there any deadlier combination, people asked each other all morning, than an idiot intern and a clueless nurse?

  I spend the morning on my IV pole, riding the big circle around the ward. It’s strange, to be out here in the daylight, and in the busy morning crowd—less busy today, and a little hushed because of the death. I go slower than usual, riding like my grandma would, stepping and pushing leisurely with my left foot, and stopping often to let a team go by. They pass like a family of ducks, the attending followed by the fellow, resident, and students, all in a row, with the lollygagging nutritionist bringing up the rear. Pulmonary, Renal, Neurosurgery, even the Hypoglycemia team are about in the halls, but I don’t see the GI team anywhere.

  The rest of the night I lie awake in bed, waiting for them to come round on me. I can see it already: everybody getting a turn to kick Dr. Chandra outside my door, or Dr. Snood standing casually with his foot on Dr. Chandra’s neck as the team discussed my latest ins and outs. Or maybe he wouldn’t eve
n be there. Maybe they send you home early when you kill somebody. Or maybe he would just run and hide somewhere. Not sleeping, I still dreamed about him, huddled in a linen closet, sucking on the corner of a blanket, or sprawled on the bathroom floor, knocking his head softly against the toilet, or kneeling naked in the medication room, shooting up with Benadryl and morphine. I went to him in every place, and put my hands on him with great tenderness, never saying a thing, just nodding at him, like I knew how horrible everything was. A couple of rumors float around in the late morning—he’s jumped from the bridge; he’s thrown himself under a trolley; Ella’s parents, finally come to visit, have killed him; he’s retired back home to Virginia in disgrace. I add and subtract details—he took off his clothes and folded them neatly on the sidewalk before he jumped; the trolley was full of German choirboys; Ella’s father choked while her mother stabbed; his feet hang over the end of his childhood bed.

  I don’t stop even to get my meds—Nancy trots beside me and pushes them on the fly. Just after that, around one o’clock, I understand that I am following after something, and that I had better speed up if I am going to catch it. It seems to me, who should really know better, that all the late, new sadness of the past twenty-four hours ought to count for something, ought to do something, ought to change something, inside of me, or outside in the world. But I don’t know what it is that might change, and I expect that nothing will change—children have died here before, and hapless idiots have come and gone, and always the next day the sick still come to languish and be poked, and they will lie in bed hoping not for healing, a thing which the wise have all long given up on, but for something to make them feel better, just for a little while, and sometimes they get this thing, and often they don’t. I think of my animals and hear them all, not just the cat but the whole bloated menagerie, crying and crying, make it stop.