The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  “What?” she whispered, and he brought his face so close to hers that the sweat rolling off her nose clung briefly to his before falling to strike her foot. “I love you,” he said. Oh no. You are over that, Jemma. There’s no harm in this, and no mischief, and O I will fill chapters in the Book of the King’s Daughter with all the evil things you and he could be doing now, and though God is even now raising His hand to strike the world, it is not to punish your pleasure, or because a good man loves you, or because you love him, or because you have angered your dead, or betrayed the dreadful imaginary empiricisms that support your depressing logic. Fine, swallow your words—that low, warbling groan contains the same number of syllables as I love you, and it’s close enough for Rob. Fine, spike your delight with dread, but don’t stop, please don’t stop now.

  Fine orgasms recalled others. She was not a person who reflected all the next day on the pleasure, and wasted hours on the daydreamy wanting of it. But as she approached the finish with Rob Dickens, she thought of the time with her first lover when she had been sure she’d briefly felt all he felt, and had been disappointed at what he got, because it seemed so small, a spasm that satisfied for less than a second and left behind a terrible need. She thought of the time in college she’d stepped ever-so-carefully home after a night of drinking mushroom tea with her friend Vivian and a set of silly girls from her organic chemistry class. She’d spent the dawn hours with a banana and an imaginary creature she named the Monkey King. And what she thought was her first, when she was still in grade school, in a dream, when Jesus had floated down from Heaven to become a pure white glow beneath her sheets.

  Now she bent down on the floor in a compact posture of worship. Rob was behind her. He was unable to keep silent. She heard his singing moan with utter clarity—it struck a chord in her and increased her pleasure—but kept silent herself, helped by the Hello Kitty pencil case, found under the bed, which she’d wedged in her mouth. She could feel the pencils roll and crunch under her teeth as she got closer, and she could still hear the thunder rolling, though the lightning had stopped. “I’m right there,” said Rob. “I’m right there.”

  When Jemma looked up toward the window she saw that it was entirely black, blank even of the washing rain. She felt suddenly lifted up, as if someone were tossing her high in the air, or like she was riding an elevator at insane speeds thousands of feet into the sky. It was almost unbearable, and she cried out, despite her best efforts to keep silent. She got lost briefly, imagining herself bursting apart in a most agreeable explosion. She watched calmly as forty little Jemmas (she had time to count them) went flying out on curling tracks, trailing fairy-dust sparkles out of their bottoms. They faded, except for one, who calmly regarded Jemma with a face that became the face of the King’s Daughter, wise and malformed. It stared and stared until Jemma opened her eyes.

  “Oh God,” Rob said, then leaned forward over her, pressing his chest against her back, his face into her neck, and placing his hands around her belly.

  “What’s happening?” Jemma asked, confused now, and a little nauseated because the lifted sensation was still with her. She felt them being drawn higher and higher. The window was a slate; it did not reflect them when they rose unsteadily on their cramped legs to try to look through it. Then they were lifted with a new force, so hard and fast that they fell down and lay together with their faces pressed against the carpet. She knew quite certainly that something horrible was happening, and that it was all her fault—I got him, after all, she thought, and, Here it is, and, How stupid, to think it could end anyway but like this. She heard a voice, courteous and mechanical, and certainly a voice apart from the babbling chorus in her head. It said, “Creatures, I am the preserving angel. Fear not, I will keep you. Fear not, I will protect you. Fear not, you will bide with me. Fear not, I will carry you into the new world.”

  The problem in me is the problem in the world. The problem in the world is the problem in me. I have always known this. Even when I did not understand it, it was still in me, the question and the answer together, knotted up like a pair of hands clenched together in pathetic anguished prayer.

  When I was five years old I tried to kill my sister. All day long I tried to kill her. In the morning I put mothballs in her cereal, but our mother woke up and threw them away, not because she smelled the naphthalene, but because she thought cereal was for trailer park kids, and on the days when she could get out of bed in time—a century’s weight of ghosts kept her sleeping or staring at the ceiling in her darkened room until noon many days—she would make us fancy omelets.

  I took my sister for a walk and tried to sacrifice her on a stone picnic table in the Severna Forest Coliseum. I knew the story of Isaac. I knew the whole of the Old Testament by then. I raised a smooth stone as big as my fist and prepared to knock a hole in her skull. I waited too long, imagining the blood on the stone and a clump of her hair matted to it. A troop of Brownies came rustling through the tall grass—the coliseum was built by a wealthy Baptist with a passion for Greek tragedy and outdoor theater, but once he moved away it was let to fall into disrepair—and Jemma leaped off the table and ran to dance with them around one of the decaying plaster statues.

  I tried to drown her in the tub. Our mother was throwing a party for the elites of our neighborhood, which is to say for everybody, since everyone who lived there was odiously rich, the cat-food magnate having established a tradition of exclusivity in this heavily wooded peninsula on the Severn. She sent us together to the tub, and I washed my sister’s hair, just as I had been taught to do, and then when she ducked under the water to rinse I held her there. I had never been taught to drown a person, but I knew just what to do. My hands felt old and wise as she struggled under them. I am sending you to Jesus, I told her. But I remember the moment perfectly, and I know I was not trying to kill her because I thought it would make her happy.

  And finally I pushed her off the roof. We dressed up for the party, and wandered from drunk to drunk, inhabiting a whole different world from the one at their level of sight. Four feet off the ground, nobody noticed if you stole a cigarette from where it was burning in the ashtray, or nipped from unattended drinks. No one noticed that I was drunk. I only got more sullen and angry, and so it hardly showed. We were sent to bed, but we did not sleep. I took Jemma out on the roof, something I did all the time. And usually I would tell her all the things that had made me angry that day, or point out lights on the river, or try to get her to see shapes in the stars. But tonight all I could think of was the crowd in our house and on the deck. It was late in September but very warm, and from where we sat on the top of the roof I could see men in short sleeves and women in short dresses, but none of them thought to look up, and they would probably not have seen us anyway in our dark pajamas.

  Look at them, I said to my sister. Just look at them! And I thought that she must be like me, and that just for her to see them would be for her to hate them, like just to see the world was to hate it, every little cloud and bird and bush, and just to look in the mirror was to hate myself so much I could feel a trembling ache all over my body. One day I’ll go, I said, and then I’ll take them all. I did not know what it meant, to go. I only knew it was the right word, and the right sentiment—sudden and strange and certain as a divine inspiration. And then I pushed her at them, because I was sure just in that moment, though I knew better as soon as she started to roll, that she would be a bomb to kill them all when she hit.

  Right away I regretted it. It was a mistake to push her, and it had been a mistake to try to drown her, and stone her, and poison her. It was a mistake because it was a horrible sin, the worst thing I had done and the worst thing I would ever do, and now it had set the tone and the theme for my whole life. And it was a mistake because I knew, just in that moment when I was revealed to myself as utterly depraved and irredeemably vile, that it was I and not my sister who must be the deadly sacrifice.

  Dr. Chandra was in the cafeteria, the place to which he habitu
ally retreated after an on-call humiliation. There was no consolation in pudding, but he still stuffed himself with it every time something went wrong, every time he tangled himself in something really unfortunate, or tripped at exactly the worst time, falling into another mother and squeezing at her boob for purchase. You do that more than twice and people think you are feigning clumsiness for the sake of the grope, but he thought boobs the unloveliest things in the world; he’d cross the street to avoid a particularly large, stern pair. Every time he wrote the wrong dosage for a drug, and every time he got caught only pretending to hear a murmur or making up a laboratory value he’d failed to memorize, he’d come down to the cafeteria, always to the same table if it was available, stuck in a glass alcove, windows that looked over the memorial butterfly garden. You didn’t have to be a dead child to get a butterfly there, but that was mostly what they represented, preemies who never made it out of the nursery or toddlers who couldn’t beat their brain tumor or teens who succumbed to leukemia. The pudding was cheap and filling. He ate it and ate it until he thought he could feel it squeezing from the pores of his nose.

  “Is it in?” he had asked Emma, when he had tried to intubate the monstrous child.

  “I don’t fucking know,” she said. “We’re tubing a baby, not having sex.” Then she bumped him out of the way and looked in the child’s mouth. “In his brain, maybe,” she said, yanking out the tube, then putting in another, all in about twenty seconds. “There you go,” she said, patting Dr. Chandra on the shoulder. She walked off, and he noticed for the hundredth time how she had curls that really bounced. Natalie was shaking her head. The medical student was staring at the ceiling. When the respiratory therapist asked him for vent settings, Chandra just walked away.

  I could just leave, he thought to himself in the cafeteria. It was a thought that had occurred to him before, to walk out of residency, out of the hospital, and out of the horrible half-life. He’d walked out of rotations before, but only as far as the Residency Director’s office, to complain and to cry to the man who insisted they all call him Dad. Nothing ever came of it, and he always went back to work. Tonight it was raining too hard to walk out, though maybe that would be a better option than remaining—to leave the hospital and be swept away, out into the bay and through the Golden Gate, out to the Farrallons where he could live on puffins and baby seals, a better diet than humiliation and misery and vanilla pudding.

  A noise took him away from the Farallons—a surge in the wind. Suddenly it blew so heavily he felt the hospital rock. The few other late-night diners looked up from their pizza or ice cream or pudding. Chandra rose and pressed his face against the window. Now the rain was falling so hard it totally obscured the garden. When the window went dark he thought it was because of the sheer volume of rain, until he saw his pale face reflected in the depths of the darkening glass, and saw that all the others were going to the windows to examine them, too. When he pressed his face against the glass, and cupped his hands at his temples to block out the light, he still couldn’t see through. Staring and squinting, he saw a dim flash of light, as if at a great distance, and thought it must be lightning struggling to shine through the rain.

  “What’s going on?” he asked no one in particular. Nobody answered. The others in the cafeteria only tried like he had to see out the darkened windows. He turned back and was about to try again when he felt the first big lurch. They’re all going to laugh at me, he thought as he fell, just after he knocked his head on the table. But before he felt himself pressed back flat against the floor, he had time to see that everyone else was falling, too.

  Three floors up Emma was relaxing—as much as she ever did on call—in her luxurious call room. It was really an attending-level call room, but then she was nearly an attending, and had anyway been outthinking and outclassing most of the attendings since her first year of fellowship. But who needed a vanity in their call room, and to take a bath in the whirlpool tub was only asking to be called out wet and naked into the middle of a crisis. She lay in bed a little while, visiting in spirit every baby in the unit, holding them a minute in her expansive mind, considering their afflictions and trying to anticipate the dips and turns their hospital courses might take that night. There was nothing she could think of that she had not already warned Natalie to watch for, or that Natalie would not anticipate herself. You couldn’t spell out everything for them, and she left more than usual unspoken with Natalie, who was smarter than the average third-year, or less dumb, at least. She did an imaginary survey of the PICU as well, since she was covering both units tonight. The regular PICU fellow was still trying to swim in.

  Sirius Chandra passed briefly through her mind, tangled up and confused and goofy and already slightly smelly, she’d noticed standing close to him, though the night was hardly half-over. She thought of tracking him down in whatever hidey-hole he’d retired to, for the sort of talk a good and empathetic Fellow was supposed to deliver to a really dispirited Intern, but it seemed too late for tears and complaints and excuses. She turned on the television but it played only a moment—a glimpse of a girl and her horse who she managed to recognize as Pippi Longstocking before the station cut out, and then every station she tried was off the air. She turned it off, and sat down on the bed, and got a page, not from the unit just outside her door, but from her home.

  “She’s fine,” her husband said as soon as he picked up the phone. Their daughter was five months old that week.

  “Pretty late for a social call,” she said.

  “Such a storm,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Well, I might have been.”

  “Better to be woken by someone you love.”

  “Who says I don’t love these people?”

  “She’s sleeping right through the thunder. Did you know she twitches when she sleeps?”

  “Are you sitting there watching her again? No wonder you can’t sleep. Were you checking her breathing? It’s fine. It’s always going to be fine, and even if it wasn’t, you’re not going to catch it by staring at her. You’ve just got to relax. Don’t you think I’ll tell you if there’s something wrong with her? Paul? Paul?” She listened for him—sometimes he fell very silent and she could barely hear him breathing—and she thought the line was dead until a lady’s voice spoke out of the phone.

  “He is gone, my love. Gone forever, not to be seen again in this world. He is already drowned, but not you. You I will protect and preserve and love for all your allotted time.”

  “Who is this?” Emma demanded, so nervous all of a sudden that she was holding the phone in front of her face and shouting into it. “Is this the fucking operator?” She only got silence for an answer, and then she got the terrible heaviness that comes of being thrust up so impossibly high, so impossibly fast. Not even an angel wielding the sheltering grace of God could cushion her fully. She fell back, like all the rest.

  Down the hall, in another call room, Rob was speaking.

  “Something awful has happened,” he said to Jemma, and she was reminded of her mother, who had spoken those very same words, in the same sort of frightened, croaking whisper, when Jemma came home on the night of her brother’s death. She was reminded, too, of the feeling she’d had as soon as she came in the house—she had known that something was horribly wrong before she saw anyone, before anyone delivered the news. She and Rob dressed hurriedly, pulling on each other’s scrubs by mistake, so Jemma’s shirt hung on her and Rob’s clung tight across his shoulders. Neither of them remembered to put their socks on. Jemma opened the door, after they’d both hesitated a while, listening. The hall outside was empty. The red preemie footprints wandered along the carpet, same as they had when the two of them had gone into the call room. It all seemed quite normal, until a great wail, not a child’s, came washing along the walls. The telephone lady’s voice spoke as if in response. “Be comforted, my darlings.”

  They followed the little footprints back toward the NICU. The call room was placed so that a person
should be able to run from bed to the unit or the delivery rooms in less than two minutes, but they creeped along so carefully that it took a whole five minutes just to come to the door to the glass bridge, or rather the place where that door had been. What previously had been a glass door was now a great circle of darkened glass, opaque and slate gray like the window in the call room, reflective only of flesh-colored shadows. Jemma put her hand against it and drew it back immediately. The glass was so cold her fingers stuck a little as she pulled her hand away. “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “Something awful,” said Rob. “Come on.” He took her hand and drew her along, past the pictures of children at play and past the giant newspaper articles. These all looked the same to Jemma’s eye. Outside the unit, though, there was something new. Just beyond the doors, where she was sure a water fountain had stood earlier in the evening, there was now a little recess set waist-high in the wall, surrounded on three sides with flat squares of colored glass. Just above the recess was a greater light than all the others, an amber square the size of an adult hand. Rob reached past her to press his palm against it.

  “What is it?” Jemma asked.

  “A door handle, I think.”

  “Name me, I will keep you,” said the woman’s voice, seeming to speak from within the hole in the wall.

  “Just open the door. Open the damn door.”

  “Until I am named, I cannot keep you, I cannot preserve you, I cannot make the thing you desire. John Robert Dickens, I have named you, now you must name me.”

  “What the fuck?” Rob said, taking his hand away. “How do you know my name? Who the fuck are you?”

  “I am the preserving angel,” she said again. Jemma walked past him and swiped her badge through the old reader that still sat next to the door. The double doors were quiet a moment, as if considering whether or not she should be admitted, then suddenly swung in.